


we've got something kinda funny going on

by mindshelter



Series: tell me what you want what you really really want [2]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man (Tom Holland Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Friends to Lovers, Gen, Identity Reveal, Mutual Pining, Peter Parker-centric, Slow Burn, all this with a side of peter kicking ass in nyc, as the perfect dumbass-genius hybrid, fluff and attempts at humour my usual brand, retroactive sad
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-08
Updated: 2020-05-27
Packaged: 2021-03-03 05:40:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 28,375
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24079888
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mindshelter/pseuds/mindshelter
Summary: Peter isn’t well-liked at Midtown and that’sfine; it makes keeping Spider-man under wraps that much easier. He’s already got May. Tony, too, though that’s a more recent thing.Then, a year after homecoming—infamously known as ‘the greatest social blunder of Peter’s short little life’—Ned Leeds makes an important decision: he and Peter are going to be friends. In the process, Peter is persuaded into joining AcaDec, captained by none other than Michelle Jones.or;peter eats too many cheese puffs, takes down a contract killer, is bodily coerced into doing some soul-searching, and develops a crush the size of a blue whale.
Relationships: Michelle Jones/Peter Parker, Ned Leeds & Peter Parker, Peter Parker & Tony Stark
Series: tell me what you want what you really really want [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1737256
Comments: 189
Kudos: 672





	1. détente

**Author's Note:**

> BOO
> 
> by popular demand and also because i wanted to: a companion piece-slash-sequel to my other fic _if you wanna be my lover (you gotta get with my friends)_. i'm still stunned by how many people liked it lol. thank you! <3
> 
> but if you're new here, this is an AU where peter doesn't become friends with ned until his junior year (ie. he goes through the events of spider-man: homecoming alone). this version of peter starts off much more isolated from his peers. 
> 
> and of course a special thank you to seekrest for being super lovely in general and also throwing song lyrics at me until i could decide on a title. without her this fic would probably still be saved as "spice-girls.docx" :')
> 
> happy reading!

It’s yet another unexceptional day—a muggy September evening, the air lukewarm and soporific with mist—when the universe sends Peter a petty, petty message: get fucked.

Denial comes first:

“Karen,” Peter says, “did he seriously just—?”

“I am afraid he did, Peter.”

Peter tips his head skyward. Ceilingward? The tube lights, emanating an eerie neon blue, have no response to offer.

Anger is next; if Peter could grab a fist of his hair in frustration right about now, he would, but it’s all smushed under his mask, damp and matted from nearly two hours of idling in stuffy, dust-laden vents.

The man bound in front of him grins at Spider-man’s ire, revealing a now-incomplete set of teeth, maraschino cherry red from a sharp uppercut to the jaw not long ago. It’d knocked him out, but only for a few moments—and that had been Peter’s mistake. Acquiring super strength means that Peter’s lost his metric for the appropriate amount of force and this time, it seems, he’d been too gentle. 

There are a few other technicians slumped about the room, adhered to lab cubbies, unconscious or groaning in various degrees of pain.

He doesn’t feel too bad, though; this entire operation wasn’t exactly conceived with ethics in mind. Peter hopes these bungholes are denied parole for the rest of their lives. 

Fury’s intel had picked up on company expenses that didn’t seem to be going anywhere. Their cybersecurity wasn’t impregnable by any means, but any holes in their code had failed to procure anything of note—which just means any incriminating data was being kept offline. What they had done, however, was a dreadfully indiscreet job of routing literally millions of dollars. Of _course_ someone would notice. Mr. Stark had made fun of them for nearly twenty minutes.

Back to scientist guy. Theodore Andersson, PhD in molecular human genetics. Absolutely up the wazoo in crazy. Or with money. They’re the same thing, at the end of the day.

Spider-man may have bested a bunch of asshole scientists tonight, but this guy must have decided that if he’s going down, he’s at the very least going to be annoying about it. 

Spider-man’s lenses contract in the best approximation of outrage that the suit can manage, and with his hands on his hips, Peter says, “Did you just _swallow_ it?”

The guy shrugs, face scrunching up in a smile that looks more like a grimace. More blood seeps out of his mouth, some from his crooked nose.

“You swallowed my USB.”

“Well, what can I say,” Andersson says, voice all gargled and wet from his broken face. He’s got a bit of an accent. Kinda French. “Years of practice has really done away with my gag reflex.”

Peter didn’t need to know that.

Karen picks this moment to chime in, pleasant as ever. “Please do not dignify that with a response, Peter.”

“Ever the voice of reason.” Peter sighs. _Anyway_ —onto bargaining. “Karen, do you think I could make him puke it back up?”

“Do you really want to do that?” Andersson asks.

“I was not asking you,” Peter snipes.

“I would consider that highly inadvisable,” Karen replies, and yeah, yeah. Karen has a point. That’s nasty and above his paygrade. “Backup is arriving at the main lobby in approximately fifty-five seconds; it is best that you let them handle Dr. Andersson from here.”

Peter’s shoulders slump, and it’s onto depression. This is his one of his first high-level missions, and Mr. Stark even vouched for him, which is so insane. Him! Mister friendly neighborhood Spider-man. Said he was a good fit for the job of apprehending a bunch of lab technicians and getting the relevant files.

He won’t get too many out-of-state opportunities like this for a while, with junior year starting tomorrow. In a way, this was supposed to be his last hurrah.

The whole premise had been simple enough. Get in through the roof vents, go right, left, left, wait, through a hallway, another vent, disable any CCTV, K.O. the staff, pocket some vials, and then download hundreds of terabytes of data. Then, the last step had been to take out the hardware a with a good-old power surge before letting SHIELD storm the place. 

Then Dr. Andersson over here power surged _him_ with a shock weapon that Peter would admittedly find way cooler if it hadn’t incapacitated him, even momentarily. 

And ate the flash drive like some egg-eating snake. God, the SHIELD personnel waiting for him at the rendezvous point are gonna think Peter’s a total moron.

“I hope you lose your doctorate,” Peter says.

“Ouch,” Andersson says. 

He pats his hip and feels the stolen serum samples still attached, blessedly intact throughout the entire kerfuffle. He just wishes his dignity was, too.

“Oh thank God,” Peter says.

Acceptance rolls in, blanketing Peter’s shoulders with a steady weight. He unmutes his comm, staring at the ground. This is embarrassing.

“Uuuhh,” he says, trying not to sound nervous, “hey guys. I got everything. Sort of? Yeah. Yeah, Southeast exit, okay. I’ll there in a sec.”

__

Tony offers to drive the two hours needed to get Peter home. It’s already dark by the time they’re on the highway, sparse of anything other than the occasional car, hulking pickup trucks and the steady limn of high-mast lights.

Driving through miles of brume, Tony makes occasional glances at his passenger, whose forehead is pressed against the dashboard. Peter’s changed into a simple hoodie and jeans, suit stowed away into his overnight bag.

“Kid,” Tony says. “It’s fine. We got some charcoal in him and put him on spin cycle like the professionals we are. Everything came right back up. _Everything_. The USB’s cleaned up and still working, so don’t worry.”

He knows. And he’s done worse. So much worse. It’s just—just. He’s been working so hard, but he was still caught off-guard when it counted. This time it was okay, but what about the next mission? What if the margin of error has to be nonexistent, next time? What then—?

Peter wants to be taken seriously. In this business he’d quickly learned it’s something you _earn_.

“Mhnng.” 

Tony knocks Peter over the head, gently, other hand still nine o’clock on the steering wheel. “It’s fine.”

“I know it’s fine,” Peter huffs, feeling childish as soon as the words leave his mouth. His skin is pink from where it had been peeled off against polished wood. “But I want to stew in my own misery.” 

Tony rolls his eyes. “Sounds healthy.”

“I learn from the best.”

“Oh, low blow, bud.” Tony pauses, face pensive. “Say, did you at least get to tell your joke about hostile work environments before you got zapped?”

Fuck, he _didn’t_. He’d been saving it—punchlines are all about the timing. “Oh. No,” he says.

“So very sorry to hear that, kid,” Tony replies, not sounding sorry at all.

They drive, and Peter eventually loses consciousness against the car door, neck bent at an unnatural angle. He’s not awake to see Tony wince at the contortion act. 

They keep driving.

Peter rouses as the Bronx transitions into Queens, rolling his shoulders to stretch before drinking in the sight of the city through the windows. There are light showers tonight and save the muted tap of raindrops hitting concrete and metal, the streets are about as tranquil as it gets. The city is a patchwork of windows glowing off-white. 

“You know,” Tony says, waiting until Peter lets out a quiet _hm?_ to signal that he’s paying attention. “It turns out Darren from squad 7B is a sympathetic puker. We got Andersson to cough up the USB, but we also got a bonus, half-digested ham and cheese. You could even tell it was multigrain.”

Peter has no idea which of the SHIELD guys was Darren. His nose scrunches up in consternation anyway. “Oh, _ew_.”

Tony hums in agreement. “It was a sight,” he adds. “Be glad you weren’t in the room when he was belching. It was _loud and sustained_.”

Peter laughs. “Who? Andersson or… uh, Darren?”

“Both of them.”

A few more blocks down, Peter pulls out his phone to text May that he’ll be home in the next ten minutes or so. The heart he gets back almost immediately brings a smile to his face.

Since crossing Whitestone bridge the rainfall has gotten harsher, the impact of water hitting the car roof like the clang of pebbles. A little more acerbic, more demanding. He hugs his bag closer, warm and dry and still fuzzy around the edges with sleep. Nothing else exists save synthetic leather seats and the world immediately visible outside the window: the patches of grass, tall oaks and concrete lit up by streetlight. Everything else is shrouded in black.

He’s going to miss going out as Spider-man practically every night, with school coming back on. Both May (and Mr. Stark, weirdly) are fully on board the Peter-needs-to-be-more-engaged-at-school bandwagon. Even if he’d done _perfectly fine_ in his classes last year, backlog of detentions he’d spent months rotting through notwithstanding.

 _It’s important to interact with your peers_ , Peter, May had said. _Spider-man isn’t your whole life, okay?_

Tony had nodded sagely from behind her, following May’s lead like he was an _adult_ adult and not a guy with, no exaggeration, two hundred robot exoskeletons. It had been surreal. Peter refrained from bringing up the absolute disaster of a proto-relationship he had with Liz early in sophomore year. They both knew about it anyway. And while Peter is decidedly not shouting on a high roof that love is dead and life is empty, the reminder always makes Peter want to change his name, move to Guam and, like, never return.

So, yeah. Peter and his peers haven’t gotten along for a while.

Plus, Tony’s one to talk. He never even went to high school.

Well, that might have _something_ to do with how Mr. Stark turned out, Peter supposes, suppressing a private snicker.

Ugh. He’ll also have less time to learn from Tony. He's been making more and more time for Peter lately and the labs and the tech and even the boring tutorials on proper _protocol_ are so _cool_. Peter sometimes wonders if Tony deliberately pulls him into the fray now to keep a better eye on him, or if it’s because he feels bad about of the whole… easily-avoidable-in-hindsight thing with the plane and arc reactors and the successive near-death experiences, but hey. Mr. Stark’s alright, and Peter gets to punch stuff. 

“Mr. Stark?” Peter says.

“Yeah?”

“Thanks for driving me home.”

“Mm,” is all Tony deigns to say. The car slows to a gentle stop as the light switches from green, to yellow. Red. A single pedestrian begins to cross the street in a light jog, jacket yanked over their head to protect their hair, CVS bag hanging from the crook of their elbow. “You did a good job today.”

“Okay,” Peter says.

Tony looks over to Peter and tilts his head. “Really. You’ve gotten a lot better in general. Rhodey doesn’t think your form is steaming garbage anymore.”

“Colonel Rhodes said my form was steaming garbage?”

“Obviously not in those exact words,” Tony says. The light turns green again, and the car plods forward. “Rhodey is more tactful than that. I, on the other hand.”

Peter smiles. “Thanks, Mr. Stark.”

“I’m serious, Peter. You’ve come a long way—you’re fighting smarter, you’re getting more efficient—”

“Okay—”

Tony holds up a finger. “I don’t appreciate being interrupted. You have access to more skills because you’ve put so much effort into building—”

“Okay, okay! I get it!” Peter laughs. They’re rolling up to the front of Peter and May’s apartment complex. Tony starts to back up into the closest parking space from the entrance, twisting around to look behind him. “You can chill.”

“What? Is it weird when I’m nice? I can be nice, gremlin.”

“You are a literal _inch_ taller than me,” Peter scoffs.

“And I will lord that fact over you.”

Tony parks and keeps his hand on the gearshift, fingers drumming against the knob. He sends a smile Peter’s way, and under all the fondness it’s drained, sapped of vitality—but not at _Peter_. Just at how long the day, month, year, lifetime had shaped up to be. It’s the smile of a busy man on a brief reprieve, taking time to make sure his mentee gets home okay.

Peter swears to himself that he’ll be worth the effort.

Suddenly, Tony’s hand lifts—and he flicks Peter hard on the temple. The younger boy jolts, and Tony chortles at how mortally offended Peter must look.

The rain is beating down hard. Tony taps at Peter’s jaw, thrice. “Chin up, kiddo.”

“I got electrocuted by a skinny dude in his fifties,” Peter says. His left side, where the battery prongs pierced skin, is still sore to prove it.

“Hey, I’m almost fifty. It’s not _that_ old,” Tony sniffs. “You could have done worse.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Sometimes Avengers missions ended up with dead and injured civilians as collateral,” Tony retorts, voice light. “You know this; _that’s_ what constitutes as failure. Failure of the highest degree. So, I reiterate: you could do worse.”

Well, Tony’s area of expertise has never been motivational speaking. Peter gets the gist, though: mistakes happen. Being a hero means that the bar is both impossibly high and sub-basement at the same time. It’s a strange tightrope to walk. “I believe you,” Peter says. “Thanks.”

Tony waves him off. “Yeah, yeah,” he mutters. He covers up a yawn. “Alright, get out of my car.”

“See you around?” Peter says, unlocking the vehicle’s door with a _click_.

“Count on it. Goodnight, kid.” 

“G’night.”

__

May usually gets out of bed before the sun even rears its ugly mug above the horizon, greeting a new day. She’s gone before Peter wakes up but has the habit of dialing her nephew in the ten-minute window Peter typically needs to avoid being late for school. The calls don’t come every day, and often it’s merely an excuse to say good morning, but Peter’s attendance record the previous year had been… lackluster, to be euphemistic about it.

There’s no telling when May will check in, and that’s probably the point—to keep Peter on his toes.

Peter might have been a little more indignant that May is concerned he’ll be late for his first class of the school year if he hadn’t failed to fall asleep when he should have, regardless of how many times he counted sheep and ran through the periodic table. He’d even done it first by ascending number and then by electronic blocks.

There’s just enough self-awareness tucked inside him to know that his decision to play Doom in bed for two hours and the subsequent migration to a YouTube video of some guy restoring a rusty cast-iron pan was poor, though.

So, when May teases him—right around when New York typically begins its gradual explosion of activity—about doing his best not to doze off on syllabus day, Peter feigns offense through his quick breakfast of cream cheese and bagel to make her laugh.

Inwardly, though, he’s worried she has a point.

__

Peter falls asleep.

He jostles awake to the sound of a clearing throat. The weight of Miss Wilkes’ severe glare is holding him up by the shoulders. Someone at the back of the room snorts.

 _Whoopsie_ , Peter thinks. In his defense, Miss Wilkes is old-school and refuses to part ways with her overhead projector that’s older than her students, so the room’s lighting is scaled down and the blinds are all drawn, save for one window at the back of the classroom.

So sue him, it’s the perfect ambiance for a nap.

“Already setting a precedent for the semester, are we, Mr. Parker?” she says. Miss Wilkes is old and has a voice as coarse as 60-grit sandpaper. She’s an estimated five years to five weeks away from retirement and a total, complete hardass with exams that warrant breaking out into Ave Maria. 

Peter likes her. Miss Wilkes gives an estimated zero shits unlike the younger, meeker teachers that were hesitant to tell Peter off whenever he used to ditch class. Like they were afraid of Peter, which is still ridiculous to him. Whether they truly believed anything the student rumor mill had to say, they erred on the side of safety. Meanwhile, Miss Wilkes will squint at him like she wants him buried in a ditch.

“Er, no,” Peter says, a little blearily, throat croaking out the noises. “Sorry. I’m awake.”

Miss Wilkes breathes out of her nostrils, mutters _strike one_ , and brings her attention back to her laminated copy of the course outline. Peter’s still a bit too zoned out to tune into her voice and figure out how far along she is, so he taps—he squints at the seating map and makes out ‘Ned Leeds’—Ned on the shoulder to ask.

The other boy tenses. Peter frowns. It’s never been fun being on the receiving end of that.

Ned is looking at him, a question in his expression.

Peter answers it. “How far along are we? On the outline, I mean.”

“We’re on lab schedules,” Ned says, “from the top of the second page.”

The conversation ends there. Peter thanks him and runs his finger along his handout. There’s a electrochemistry lab coming up first thing next week to get everyone’s feet wet.

And it looks like reports are group work with whoever Miss Wilkes seated you with. Peter glances over at Ned, who’s hunched over with his phone hidden under his desk, alternating between listening and playing piano tiles. He’s pretty good.

Well. It’s gotta happen sometime if they’re going to be lab partners.

Peter spends a few minutes psyching himself up until he finally clears his throat:

“Uh, Ned?”

Ned’s thumb pauses above his phone screen, game unpaused. He locks his phone. “Yeah?” he replies.

“Can I get your number?

Ned bristles. “What?”

“For reports and stuff. Since we have to work in pairs?”

After a few more breaths and bewildered blinking, Ned gives an aborted, “ _Oh_ —yeah. Sure thing.”

Nice. How’s _that_ for interacting with your peers?

__

Peter sits through comparative government, statistics, and then biology. His last period is empty, so he signs out his textbooks and combination lock for the school year while the halls are still quiet. Soon, his locker—a dented, rusting thing near the base of Midtown’s North stairwell—is filled up. He places a first-aid kit carrying some spare canisters of web fluid on the top shelf and pins a printout of his schedule onto the rear side of the door with a magnet he stole off the fridge at home.

Then it’s time to head out. 

The first order of business after deboarding from the R line is to make a stop at his favorite hot dog stand-slash-health code violation. It’s a chunky metal cart camped out near a busy intersection with a big yellow umbrella, dirty with exhaust fumes.

He finishes up his second lunch, drops his backpack off in his apartment, and suits up.

The skies are bright and clear; the likelihood of Spider-man catching anyone is as small as it gets, but Peter at sixteen doesn’t mind all that much. He’s spent a good part of the past week improving his stealth and learning useful but painfully dull things like breath control.

Now, he can relish in movement, the burning sensation in his windpipe. 

Nothing beats swinging around the city that raised him—New York, in all its charm and violence and humanity—cutting sharp corners around tall buildings. Sometimes he wishes that he could dart around, mask off. Just to really feel the wind cut at his face and sweep through his hair.

Up here he can watch the scenery below shrink and shrink, dot after dot on canvas. Up here he is bigger than he is.

Peter had been fourteen and Spider-man had been a compulsion, each trip he had made to sneak out from under May’s nose carrying an undercurrent of grief, cloying like glue. 

Peter is sixteen now and for the most part happy to help wherever he can. He’s big leagues now. Kind of. A big leagues trainee. There are patrol routes of his own design programmed into his suit to optimize his nights. He’s getting well-acquainted with the comings and goings of the city’s criminal enterprises.

Plus, like the shrewd person he can sometimes be, Peter actually heeds May’s raised eyebrows and settles for dropping anonymous tips to the NYPD instead of staying out as Spider-man from dusk till dawn.

Most of the time.

(“Maybe I’ll ‘lay off’ when they _do their jobs properly_ ,” Peter had said at one point, hunched over his laptop. He was dressed in a flannel pajama set with cartoon dinosaurs, hair sporting an impressive cowlick. Around him had been an emerging ring of rice krispy treat wrappers.

“Honey,” May had said, “riddle me this. What day is it?”

“Um, Saturday?”

“Incorrect,” she’d said, sugarplum sweet while ruffling his hair. “Go the fuck to sleep.”)

Spider-man doesn’t do much in the few hours he’s out, but he helps a frazzled couple change a flat tire and stops a little girl on a tricycle from biking onto a busy street and right into the trajectory of a distracted taxicab.

They’re not lesser tasks. Just different.

He goes home, because Peter has hardly seen his aunt in a week between her shifts and him chomping at every last morsel of summer vacation manageable. They leave a window or two open so that the cool nighttime draft brings some fresh air into the living room.

They have takeout for dinner and talk about their days while crammed together on the loveseat. When May plants a kiss on his temple, long hair tickling his cheek, the smell of her shampoo fills his nostrils. _Christmas in the Car_ is playing on the TV monitor even though the winter holidays are still months away. The two of them slurp up greasy noodles and sing along to _Jingle in the Jungle_.

Life is pretty alright.

__

Ned’s pretty quiet, but since the Accidentally Lowkey Beat Flash Up Incident (ugh) and the Homecoming Incident ( _uugh_ ), Peter has learned that wariness manifests as silence, too.

Before—he’s never been intimidating, in the _before_. Awkward, yes, and not great at finding a rapport with new people, but not scary. Couldn’t have dreamt of it. He’d been small, consistently in the lower percentiles for height with coke-bottle glasses that could stop a bullet. He loved people—loves people—but was hardly _good_ at people.

Now, Peter owns five drugstore concealer sticks. May taught him that green and yellow are for redness, that purple brightens up dark circles, and explained how to blend so he doesn’t end up looking like a total tool. He’s kept his head down since last year, and people have, for the most part, stopped skittering around him like he’s a ticking time-bomb.

So, a week later, he tries not to be too obtrusive and speaks up first, offering to get the solutions they’ll need for the lab while Ned lines up to get the salt bridge and a voltmeter.

Once they have the whole shebang set up and there’s nothing to do accept watch a screw coat itself with copper, he and Ned settle into an awkward silence.

Peter leans against the workbench, his foot tapping against bleached floor tile. His goggles are uncomfortable and itchy and keep sliding down his nose. Every minute or so he has to push them back up.

Miss Wilkes gives late deductions if assignments aren’t handed in right when she expects them—which would be first thing next Monday—so Peter needs to get his part of the report done and study ahead for his Spanish quiz Thursday night because there is no fresh way in hell Peter is going to waste precious time during his weekend on homework.

Three nights ago, Spider-man intercepted what would’ve been a bloody neighborhood shooting in South Brooklyn.

The night before, Peter caught a guy stealing almost ninety dollars’ worth of cigarettes. Why so many? Why all the same brand? Wouldn’t it be easier to plow a whole shelf into a bag instead of neatly taking a whole row of the same thing?

An initiation rite, probably. And right on time for similar incidents reported in the same area: two on Gravesend and 15th, another along Bedford, several other analogous reports scattered across the borough. Bigger numbers than what was seen in the years before; why the seasonal uptick?

Anchovies. This is time sensitive. If syndicates are trying to increase their numbers before… whatever the hell is going to happen, he needs to get all the intel possible to make sure less people will end up hurt—

A shatter wrangles him out of his thoughts. As the lab falls into an awed hush, Peter spots a growing pool of liquid expanding out from a pile of broken glass, the same hue as tropical punch kool-aid.

“Welp,” Ned mutters. “Rest in pieces, Cindy.”

Cindy must be the girl three benches down, standing over the remains of her beaker. Eyes clenched shut and hands closed into tight fists, it’s almost as if she’s saying, _Almighty fuck_.

Peter cringes in sympathy.

__

**Peter >> Ned **

[22:49] [file]

[22:49] here’s a scan of my stuff since you said you’re printing lol

[22:50] just to keep things organized

**Ned**

[23:01] :O

[23:02] that was fast

**Peter**

[23:05] i’m busy on the weekend so i’m just sending my bit over now

[23:06] does it look ok?

**Ned**

[23:10] yeah it’s rlly good

[23:11] ty!!

**Peter**

[23:17] cool lmk if there’s any problem

[23:18] see you monday

__

It doesn’t take long to fall into a pattern:

Peter gets up and goes to school.

He gets out of school, studies, eats, and does his thing as Spider-man. In an exceptional exercise in restraint, he’s back most weeknights past eleven-thirty but before midnight, right after the police finalize their patrol shift changes for the night. On weekends, he’s out longer; robberies peak past ten, but shootings and felony assaults stretch out closer to two, often threeish in the morning.

He goes to bed. He gets up and goes to school.

May, however, now demands he take at least two or three days off every week. No wiggle room, no negotiations. He’s tried.

So, on his civilian-only days, Peter often finds himself with nothing to do. Part of him understands that that might very well be the point. Another part of him is petulant anyway.

His ‘breaks’ are spent stopping by the laundromat. He always claims the second-last washing machine that’s facing the window. On some days Tony makes a point to pop into his and May’s apartment because he was “in the neighborhood.” Every so often he leaves snacks—the latest of which was, for some reason, a warehouse-sized pail of cheese puffs.

He naps on the couch and goes with May to the Thai place with that waiter who’s mooning over his aunt and leaves complimentary mango rice. He practices catching cheese puffs with his mouth, accidentally eats ninety-six of them in one sitting before he realizes his palate is desert-dry, and almost hits his head on one of the tall kitchen cabinets. May laughs at him.

If he tunes into traffic camera feeds every now and then, well, whatever. It’s _his_ city.

__

Ned is more affable in the following two weeks. Peter’s unsure as to what caused the shift, but doesn’t give it too much thought.

Come time to hunker down and get ready for their first unit exam, they’ve upgraded to semi-successful attempts at small talk during the start of class. Ned asks Peter how his morning was, Peter says fine and parrots the question. Ned says the commute sucked. Rinse, repeat.

Lines of ink—printed onto paper in deep strokes—blur and split and come back into focus as Peter shakes himself to alertness for the gazillionth time since first period had begun.

He’d actually turned in right at two last night, which is adequate, by his sensible standards.

His body begs to differ. Peter yawns, tears beading at the corners of his eyes.

Last night, he struck gold—with some sleuthing and tailing the right people, Peter found himself crawling up a quiet, run-down souvlaki joint in the Bay Ridge area before disengaging his suit’s drone. His baby spider burrowed itself under the suit collar of the second-tallest mobster of the bunch, the audio feed crackling to life right as an order for lamb in a pita, _extra onions and tzatziki, thanks_ was made.

With a windbreaker and sweats over his suit—because if they realized Spider-man smelled seafood the whole operation will scatter like cockroaches to light and he would’ve had to start all over—Peter had listened in on the roof of the multi-use complex, body tucked in an indiscreet corner.

Not exactly a hot pursuit, but hell if it didn’t feel cool. 

It turns out Peter’s suspicions were correct. One of the Brooklyn’s bigger crime families is in its middle to late stages of tearing at the seams. The patriarch is getting old and his mental decline—dementia, one of the men say, syllables muffled through a mouthful of food—is leaving an emerging power vacuum, with the old man’s brother and eldest vying for leadership. The family has been trying to keep the growing rift hush-hush, but loyalties are already becoming divided.

Maybe the shooting earlier this month was a lesser gang stepping in to gauge how much territory they could take over while the bigger guys were too distracted by infighting. He’ll have to keep looking. He hasn’t paid much attention to the marine terminal area yet. 

The cherry on the cake, of course, is that they’d apparently dealt with Vulture before his downfall—Peter had heard whispers of _Toomes_ and _that Gargan asshole._

They apparently still have alien weapons, far less predictable than any man-made firearm. Which is—well. Those things have a propensity to cause a bit of a fuss. The energy blasts from Chitauri tech leaves stuff radioactive; Peter’s already gushed to Mr. Stark about Helen Cho’s latest paper on its viability as a practical-use mutagen, but there’s also the downright concerning accounts of _bad_ radiation poisoning if it’s handled too willy-nilly.

They also explode, every so often. Just to zest it up even more. 

So yeah. Not good.

It’s only a matter of time before thing get messy. And. 

Should… probably involve the FBI at some point. Soonish.

Crime, crime, _crime_. Crime can be bad. There’s so much crime in New York. And yes, Peter technically commits felonies on a near-daily basis, but it’s the _spirit_ of the law that he’s upholding.

Peter tries and fails to stifle a yawn; his jaw unhinges so wide his cheeks sting.

He looks at his worksheet with heavy eyelids. Electrochemistry is so stupid.

Head full of cheese puffs is what he is.

He never got around to naming his suit drone; Peter’s sleep addled brain thinks that fact is indubitably unfair. God, he’s a terrible father, neglecting his spider-robot-child. Maybe he’ll name him Plankton. Like Plankton and Karen.

Would that mean his drone and AI are married?

As he slumps forward, something starts patting him on the shoulder. It’s Ned. Ned is patting him on the shoulder, a tentative hand over the crease of Peter’s hoodie. Peter turns to him, questioning.

“Hhng?” he says.

“You good there? Peter?” When Peter keeps blinking, he adds, “Are you sick?”

“Oh,” Peter says, wiping some dampness from gritty eyes. “No. Just—eight AM classes, right?”

Ned laughs. “Yeah, I feel,” he agrees. “It should be illegal to hold classes this early. All of us have crushing sleep debt, but dude—you look like a raccoon.”

With the delayed realization that he’d made a jab at Peter, Ned’s eyes grow a little wide. Lagging brain and all, Peter still catches it and wills himself to emote, lips turning up in a closed-mouth smile.

Some of the tension bleeds away. “Guess I do,” Peter agrees. _He’s_ the one who has to look at himself through the mirror while brushing his teeth every morning. He wishes he could unironically claim he’s flourishing, _thanks_ very much for the concern, but… raccoon is unfortunately on-the-nose.

“The unit exam isn’t ‘til Friday,” Ned says, “and bio is next week. You should sleep when you get home.”

Yeah. Yeah, that actually sounds like a good plan. Peter is stupid, but he’s not dumb; more work will get done if he’s feeling refreshed. He’ll forward what he already has to Mr. Stark to see what he thinks; Peter thinks he’s picked up enough puzzle pieces that he can skip patrol for tonight.

“Yeah—you know what? When I get home, I’m going to inhale the leftovers in the fridge and hibernate for the next three months.”

God, he’s tired.

“That’s solid,” Ned says, smiling. “If you’re low on time, or anything, I can handle the report next week. You already did the hardest parts the past two times; you’re making me feel like a moocher.”

Wow, Ned’s pretty nice. This is, like, the longest stretch of positive interaction he’s had with someone who isn’t thirty years his senior in a hot minute. Peter shakes his head, hand moving to cover his mouth. “Nah, I’m good. But thanks. I just stay up late. Lots—lotsa stuff to do.”

“You sure?” Ned asks, and Peter hums an affirmative. “Do you work or volunteer somewhere? Is that why you’re so busy? I do too, at this sushi place a few blocks from home.”

“Cool,” Peter says. Then, independently of his brain, in some remainder of the Pavlovian response he’d enforced in himself every time he made excuses to May before she finally caught him in costume, mutters, “Mm. Not a job, though. Internship.”

Wait.

“Woah, neat! For who?” Ned says.

Again, Peter has ceded control of whatever the hell is vocal cords are pulling. _This is not on him._ “Stark Industries.”

 _Wait_!

“No fucking way,” Ned says, incredulous. He squints. “Seriously?”

Peter _Benjamin_ Parker, you stupid raccoon-cheese-headed—

“Yuh—yes?” he says, grimacing, dragging out the word in an almost-hiss.

God. It’s too late. The ball is rolling, accelerating down a steep slope. A Stark Internship is a flimsy excuse to begin with, and doubly, triply, quintuple-y so if you inadvertently kept up a troubled kid act the previous year to ditch class. Peter is _so_ awake now, sweating a little, and his mind is screaming _Oh my God I’m Spider-man. That’s me, baby._

“Dude!” Ned whispers furiously.

He’s about to call Peter out on his bullshit. He braces himself.

“That is _so_ awesome.”

Oh.

Ned is starting to blabber, words exploding out of him like the bright flare of a sparkler. “They’re so exclusive that it hurts,” he’s saying, “I don’t even think I’ve heard of anyone that isn’t at least halfway through a bachelor’s for them to even _look_ at you, but then again you really seem to know what you’re doing. You know, I really, really hope to do a co-op term with them once I’m in uni for comp sci—or maybe comp eng, who knows—but your portfolio literally needs to be insane for you to have a chance. Woah. _You_ must have an insane portfolio. You have a Stark internship. That’s so cool.”

“Um,” Peter says.

Ned is full-on grinning. “Shit, dude! Good for you!” he exclaims, knocking Peter on the shoulder in a very bro-y way. “What’s your focus?”

Think, think, _think_ ; use your tiny ping-pong brain. Sometimes he works with Mr. Stark on his suit, with the other man and FRIDAY guiding him through the components and the tech woven in, and he’s even had the chance to tinker with some of the Iron Man suits that have been put out of use. On his own, though, he normally messes with his web fluid. He’s trying to make the stuff conductive for the fun of it, but his biggest endeavour is to synthesize a variant to work as a quick-set wound glue.

Peter knows from first-hand experience that getting stabbed is a great way to get inspired, even if he wouldn’t personally suggest it.

“Peter? Hello? Anyone in there?”

“Oh. Uh, materials science?” Yes, that sounds legit. “Polymers, mostly.”

“Dope. That explains why you’re so good at chem, then.”

Okay. Okay, Peter can salvage this; he’s Spider-man, for God’s sake, but maybe that’s not a reassuring mantra to repeat right now when the problem is that he’s Spider-man—fuck, he’s blustering. Ned probably isn’t anywhere near going from point A to B to Z, but since when does paranoia bow to logic?

“Hah, yeah,” he says, “I can show you some of my projects?”

Ah. He should’ve said something else.

“Oh, hell yeah,” Ned says. “Only if you want to, of course,” he adds upon seeing the stricken look on Peter’s face. “Some people like to keep their stuff to themselves, and I respect that. Though… you do seem pretty out of it—this’ll be a good way to keep you awake! At least then Miss Wilkes will stop giving you the stink eye.”

Peter glances over Ned’s head and finds Miss Wilkes at her desk.

And, yeah. That is not a happy woman. 

Ned’s giving him an out, but Peter doesn’t have a good read on this guy yet. Still isn’t too sure what Ned is thinking, if he’s going to eventually realize that Peter is lying out of his ass if there’s no solid proof.

Damage control it is.

He slides his laptop out from his bag and with a few careful clicks, Peter begins to show his desk-mate the PDF files of the articles he’s been referencing, plus a reaction diagram here and there. 

“Dermabond is pretty good. Cost-effective too,” Peter says, tapping at his screen and absolutely refusing to make any eye contact, “but it’s not shelf-stable since it’s, like, super sensitive to moisture, but won’t bind as well either if we put too many additives in it to make it more flexible. What I’m trying to do here—” He points at one of his drawings, “—is trying out a different formula entirely to get a glue that’s more inert… and bendy, I guess. We’ve been using a version of 2-octyl cyanoacrylate medically for decades, but it’s a huge pain to store, and only suitable for smaller cuts and stuff unless you use stitches first; too much of it can lead to chemical burns.”

“Yikes,” Ned says. 

Peter nods. “Yeah. So. That’s the gist of it.”

Ned grins. “Thanks for showing me.”

Peter nods again.

Ned leans back into his chair, pondering for a moment. The bell rings, but as Peter shoves his pens back into his bag, Ned turns back to him and asks, “Hey, are you on Steam? Do you have Doom?”

“Yeah?”

“To which question?”

“Both?”

“Yes! Nice, we should add each other,” Ned says, maneuvering backpack straps onto his shoulders. “What’s your account name? Actually, never mind. We’ll text later and sort it out.”

“Okay?”

“We’ll game together when you’re not so busy.”

Peter nods, and Ned is _beaming_.

What just happened?


	2. hobbledehoy

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> allo c'est moi bonjour

The issue of leftover Chitauri tech and pissed-off mobsters takes a spot in the backburner as the semester picks up full throttle; Peter realizes that he and Spanish conjugations are going to have a long, grief-laden semester together. He’d essentially handed the case over to SHIELD along with the audio clips and pictures Peter had dazedly sent the Tony’s way right before making friends with the couch cushions with an unceremonious _plop_.

Peter won’t lie and claim he’s not disappointed that he’s taking a step back, but it’s not too harrowing a tragedy.

He’s being mature about things, see? Sorting out his priorities—which, right now, is the sweet, sweet release of sleep.

At the very least he’ll have more time to beat Spanish’s sorry caboose, which means he’ll struggle less through the grammar assignments, which means more time for patrols. A win.

 _Good stuff. Thanks kid_ , were the words glowing on Peter’s notification bar when he’d woken up to May bustling around in the kitchen, and Peter tries not to openly preen. Outside, through the window, sunset had been well underway, the sky a smear of deep orange. _You’re on standby for now, will let you know once something comes up._

Then, as an afterthought, _Maybe you can use the opportunity to work on your time management skills._

Peter, stretching and padding over to the entryway so he could help May pack groceries into the fridge, had typed back _, hello?? Pot KETTLE???_

 _Nvm. You’re fired_ , Tony had replied.

 _nice,_ Peter had sent back.

__

As it turns out, Peter shares the spare period after lunch with Ned.

It was a discovery he’d made bumping into Ned outside of school grounds. The bruising on his ribs—three-car collision, _woof_ —had been aching like a feral bitch, so he’d stepped outside to buy an extra container of VapoRub from the CVS two blocks down.

In some tacit agreement, they begin meeting up by Peter’s locker three times a week. Peter is clueless as to how the whole arrangement transpired. The entire sequence of events since the start of term is blending into one extended blur, a gradient of stepping through the heavy metal doors leading into Midtown’s main foyer alone, into the halls alone, to class alone, to—

To whatever this is. Ned’s there, a new and not unwelcome fixture in his day. It’s nice; the transition feels seamless.

By the fourth time Ned hangs out with him outside of class—like, on his own accord and everything—Peter begins to think that they’re friends.

Friends text each other. Friends draw tic-tac-toe boards in the margins of your notebook during class to keep you alert. Ned likes playing as the circle and always draws right at the centre if given the chance. When gentler methods fail, Ned amps it up by jabbing Peter in the skull with the blunt end of a pencil.

Some days they clamber up to the second floor and into the library. Surrounded by old, tattered books frowzy with the scent of lignin and mildew, Peter explains oxidation states and the chlor-alkali process. Ned lets no good deed go unrewarded; Peter’s Spanish assignments get proofread by an expert eye.

There are days where neither of them are mentally signed-in enough to get any work done, so they bide their time walking along strips of street-side businesses within a half-mile radius of Midtown. Peter finds himself talking—not just about their assignments and upcoming deadlines, but about his favorite places in the city, how there are always guys playing in the run-down basketball court adjacent to his and May’s apartment complex no matter what the hour, or what he thinks about the latest Hellblazer issue.

It’s nice. 

They’re sitting across from each other in the booth of a Dairy Queen, chatting over the blast of top 40 radio from the ceiling speakers and offensive amounts of sugar. Peter is taking a break from scooping mouthfuls of ice cream into his mouth—he’d given himself brain freeze—when he spots Ned studying his hands.

“What happened to your knuckles?” Ned asks.

He doesn’t need to elaborate further; Peter’s left hand is neatly wrapped up in dressings, split from being overeager with his punches and brittle skin from dry weather. Right now, the skin underneath is probably a mess of clots and scabs, and they sting if he curls up his fists too much, but it’ll be totally healed by the evening.

Peter, thankfully, has invested time, energy, and maybe an evening or two of fraught brainstorming over phone calls with Tony to avoid a repeat of that first conversation he had with Ned.

He’d generally hadn’t ever had issues with people questioning the origins of his bumps and contusions, but that had been by virtue of simply never being asked.

Then came Ned. That seems to be a common theme in the past few weeks: _then came Ned._

 _The easiest thing to do,_ Tony had said, _is to go with the flow—work with the preconceptions people have about you. We all see what we’ve been led to believe. It’s an advantage if you make it one._

Peter is always a baseline level of furious with the world, always a livewire. It’s just a muted simmer most of the time. He wouldn’t—couldn’t—be Spider-man otherwise; he’d be out of steam lightning fast.

“Boxing,” Peter lies. “I grazed them on a punching bag yesterday, but they’re fine.”

Unfortunately, the boy across from him doesn’t appear wholly convinced. “You’re a man of mystery, dude,” Ned says. “How do you have time for all this stuff?”

“Class time is my second bedtime, if you haven’t noticed,” Peter quips. Ned snorts and lets it go.

Ned also asks Peter about how his SI project is going—which admittedly has been slow to progress now that Peter spends the vast majority of his time in New York City—and how Peter even came across an opportunity that big in the first place.

“SF Grant recipients get to meet with Tony Stark in person, right?” Ned asks, face pensive. “Like, there’s rumours you spend an afternoon with him, have lunch and talk.”

“Oh! Uh, yeah. It was just for an hour or two—busy schedule and all—but he seemed pretty cool.”

“Jeez. That’s so awesome,” Ned says.

Peter has a mental outline prepared with enough half-truths to keep himself consistent, and just enough detail to curb Ned’s bottomless curiosity. He’s been _thorough_ with his cover story. Once the schadenfreude had tapered off (slightly) and Tony had stopped laughing at him (kind of), they’d drafted actual documentation for an internship. They’re going to get a picture together and everything. Peter needs to decide on his outfit.

So Peter speaks of wanting to own up to last year, of all the skipped classes without any detail as to why, about how everything up to and including Liz and homecoming had been a major wakeup call. Of the subsequent application to SI’s September Foundation. All based on reality, save for the last part.

Ned’s smile is kind when he finishes explaining. “That’s amazing, Peter. Really.”

“Thanks,” Peter says, rubbing the back of his neck furtively. He brings his hand back to his spoon, fishing out a chunk of crushed candy bar. For a minute or so, the two of them savour their desserts in silence.

And then came Ned.

“Sooo,” Ned says, grinning now, “I just got an idea.”

Oh boy.

“Oh boy,” Peter says.

“You know what would, like, be super poetic?”

Puzzled, Peter looks up from his melting blizzard. It’s getting all gloopy. He probably shouldn’t have ordered a large. “What?”

“Well,” he starts, leaning forward with both hands splayed out against the table, “you know how Liz used to be AcaDec captain?” 

Yes; Peter does know—he’d spent multiple instances last year lingering outside room 207, three Wednesday afternoons in a row so he could _just so happen_ to run into Liz after club practices. You know. Like a loser.

For the sake of his dignity, though, he’s keeping that knowledge to himself. 

“Yes?” Peter answers, unsure as to what direction this is going.

“Listen,” Ned continues. “Liz was on graduation council and yearbook, but that’s just student government. But AcaDec was her wholeass _baby_. And since membership has really gone down from last year after she left, an extra head won’t hurt. And you’re pretty smart.”

Peter blinks.

“Wink nudge?”

Ned better not be implying what Peter thinks he’s implying. “Why?” he questions.

Ned knocks him on the shoulder. “C’mon,” he says, very seriously, “I’m pushing the narrative forward.”

“The… narrative,” Peter deadpans.

“Yup! I know you have Wednesday afternoons free, and the time commitment is just once a week outside of competitions. This could be your, I don’t know, redemption in her memory.”

On the surface the intention is sweet, but Peter’s eyes narrow as he wonders if anyone would interpret that the opposite way—like he’s stepping on all the hard work Liz put into Midtown before she and her mom quite literally fled the state. Peter’s lack of friends isn’t exclusively because people assume he’s embroiled in the wrong crowds; they also think he’s an ass. The seniors glared daggers into his back straight until they graduated.

“Why are you talking about Liz like she died?”

Ned rolls his eyes, mostly in jest. “People change. You’re working on yourself,” he explains. “So what better way to show that you’re sorry by—and I mean this in the least pretentious way possible—upholding her legacy here?”

Peter selects this moment to keep eating ice cream in favour of unpacking that statement.

“Also, I am definitely on board with hanging out with you more.”

Huffing out a laugh, Peter says, “And the truth comes out.”

Ned makes a _pfft_ noise between his lips. “That’s not a no,” Ned says, pointing his spoon in Peter’s direction. “Am I doing it? Am I playing up your emotions?”

Peter shrugs. He has to give Ned some credit; it’s not too terrible an idea. Plus, he looks so excited at the prospect— and Peter likes that seeing his friend excited, likes that he could be the reason why. 

Holy cow, he made a friend.

“Yeah,” Peter says. “It’s not a no. But, uh, aren’t club signups over? I thought the deadline was earlier this month.”

“Don’t you worry,” Ned says with all the confidence in the world, “I’m very charming. And I’ve got _connections_. A back door, as they call it.”

Peter tilts his head to the side. “What do you mean?”

“MJ—wait, sorry, forgot that not everyone knows her nickname. Michelle Jones? She’s the current captain. We’re actually pretty tight,” Ned explains. When Peter takes too long to react, he adds, “Do you know her?”

 _Oh fuck_ , Peter thinks. He _has_ heard that name before.

__

Miraculously, Ned informs Peter the next morning that he has been greenlighted to attend next week’s AcaDec practice. Irrelevant to the current situation, Peter is beginning to wonder if Ned is magic.

He’d been so sure that the whole idea of Peter joining AcaDec would get shut down on the spot; according to his calculations, Michelle surely cannot be okay with him joining. Not unless Peter is remembering the incorrect the surly, tall girl that tended to linger behind Liz.

“Oh, that’s whatever,” Ned dismisses when Peter brings up his concerns about her, like it’s no big thing.

“She flipped me off at homecoming,” Peter insists. This girl cannot be okay with him. How did Ned manage to convince her?

“I’m pretty sure that was just because you were coming onto her crush at the time,” Ned says. “So I’m mostly sure it was just a jealousy thing. Nothing personal.”

“That is literally negative three percent reassuring. Wait. _Wait_ ,” Peter says. Then his spine goes ramrod straight. “Ned, Ned. Are you telling me I sent her crush to the opposite side of the country? To _Oregon_?”

“That _you’re_ the reason why she moved is a bit strong. It was more because Spider-man exposed her dad as, you know, an illegal arms dealer?”

Holy shit. Peter is so fucked.

“You can’t tell me she didn’t watch me ditch Liz at homecoming and thought to herself,” Peter grouses, “‘yup, that’s a guy I wanna be around.’”

“Well obviously not?” The _duh_ lingers heavily between them.

“ _Ned!_ ” Peter groans. Ned shrugs helplessly, not even bothering to wipe off the veneer of amusement off his face. “Oregon.”

“Hey, there’s nothing wrong with Oregon. I’ve heard nice things. They’ve got stuff like… lakes? Oh, and the world’s biggest mushroom.”

“Really not the point—wait, the world’s biggest mushroom?”

“Yeah,” Ned says. “The Oregon humongous fungus. It’s at least two-and-a-half miles big. So, uh, Liz has that going for her?”

Wow. That _is_ cool.

“How do you know this?”

“MJ is basically a fun facts dispenser if you ever manage to get her started,” Ned says. “She’s all—cold cases! Bottom-feeders!”

Huh. Okay.

“Dude, it’s okay, seriously,” Ned says. “I know MJ. If she’s willing to give you a shot she does not think that you’re an ass, I promise. When I talked to her, she was only worried about your attendance. And you know, she’s pretty cool once you get to know her.”

He can back out, right? Stay in his insular, melodramatic bubble?

But no. Michelle is already taking time out of her life to let Peter try out. If he flakes, he’ll only look worse and Spider-man is no lily-livered _wuss_.

And he’d make Ned sad. Which, uh, _no_.

So he says, “Okay.”

Ned whoops, victorious. “Maybe you two will even bond, eventually,” he says. “You can both start a support group: the ‘I fell victim to Liz’s good looks and outrageously great personality’ club. On the itinerary for your first meeting: how to move on from her beautiful smile.”

Peter turns pink, ears heating up; Ned is out to kill him in cold blood. “Look, I know you’re joking—”

“Says who—”

“But I need to be completely clear that there’s no way I’m doing that.”

__

Peter worries anyway.

He does that: worry. He worries about what’s happening in the streets whenever he’s not around, a constant, low thrum in his blood. Like dormant wasps under his skin.

He worries for May’s safety if the wrong people were ever to connect him to Spider-man. He worries about the teenagers that don’t have much more to their names than a ratty backpack and a handful of change, if anything. About the felons that are only trying to make rent.

The spider venom imbued into his cells is what Peter sometimes considers a gift—an opportunity, an avenue to tamp down the constant refrain of _how dare you sit quietly while others suffer, while someone’s entire world might be burning down to nothing how dare you get out there, go go GO_ —

Peter tries not to worry about himself. Not in the sense that he neglects his own health; he eats and does his best to sleep and goes the hell home if his body sends enough warning signs. It’s been a long time since the thrill of a bloody mouth was worth the clarity that followed.

And there was a learning curve for it, for sure, but Peter had figured out how to stop caring too much about what others thought of him—not the students in his year or the upperclassmen, who speak about him like he’s dirty laundry. He’s there to get a diploma, and not—not to be popular, he supposes. It’s an elusive, alluring commodity for sure, but it won’t matter in a few years.

Peter’s worrying now, though. He wants to make a good impression on Michelle. She’s Ned’s friend—and the friend of your friend is someone you should at least be civil with, right? Peter guesses they’re already technically not on stable footing, despite the lack of mutual interaction.

What if he drives a wedge in Michelle and Ned’s friendship? Ned was her friend first; Peter will gladly back off if he makes her uncomfortable.

He wants this to work. His stomach, rolling and rolling like a ball of dung picking up debris every time he thinks about it too hard, wants it to go well, too.

Peter breathes; the air is crisp. He’s finishing up his run through the city, and it’s a cool night. The wind is plucking dying leaves off branches. They flutter down towards concrete and paved road in a messy dance. Cloudy skies obscure the moon and the blinking lights of aircraft. 

Feet landing lightly on the railing, Peter latches onto brick wall and begins his short crawl towards his bedroom.

There are tentative plans swimming in his head to do more research on how AcaDec competitions work once he’s taken a shower and changed into pajamas. Peter clicks open the latches on his window and gingerly slides the old frame upwards.

From what he’s gathered already it seems nuts; there are multiple choice exams, prepared speeches, even an interview category where you, tragically, have to talk about _yourself_ —

There’s a hefty paper bag sitting on his bed, over his comforter and all other thoughts are flushed away, just like that.

The top is rolled up and the side has “You might be interested –TS” written in thick permanent marker.

Peter smothers a laugh, fond. Mr. Stark is _so_ dramatic.

__

Tony picks up on the sixth ring. “Y’ello.”

“Hiya, Mr. Stark,” Peter chirps, and the next sentence is hard to force out because he’s cutting himself off with guffaws. “I got this big package? I think it’s from, uuuh, tofu stink.”

He can hear Tony exhale, a full four seconds and a fraction longer through the line. “I should have never introduced you to Rhodey. Jesus.”

“Aw, you don’t mean that, Mr. Stank.”

“Oh, but I do.”

Peter is positively giddy. He was _right_ , and also pretty sure he’s starting to vibrate.

Spider-man activities in the city are postponed that weekend as Peter visits the compound for the first time in over a month. He hugs May goodbye when Happy rolls in to pick him up and buckles up in the passenger seat.

For the next two days, Peter makes increasingly gooey iterations of his web fluid until version fifteen is, to his complete delight, the exact same consistency as silly putty.

Peter also establishes himself once and for all as DUM-E’s favorite person.

“I _made_ him,” Tony protests. “My own sweat and oil. My own terrible baby.”

“The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb,” Peter replies, patting DUM-E’s claw. DUM-E beeps happily while Mr. Stark sends them both a withering stare. “What? I’m cultured. I know quotes.”

Tony sighs and slides a container of fruit over to where Peter had stationed himself.

Referencing whatever floor plans FRIDAY had managed to dig up along with renders of previously seized Chitauri ammunition, Peter goes through mission simulations with SI’s BARF tech. By his fourth test run, Peter manages to extract the energy cell, replace it with a decoy and reassemble the weapon in under five minutes.

Operation _Happy Home Invasion_ is a go. He gets the alien weapons out of the way and SHIELD’ll be able to take care of the unrest brewing in Brooklyn with less to worry about.

The relevant clues, as it turns out, have directed them to an unassuming brownstone among a line of many other, equally unassuming brownstones in Brooklyn’s Park Slope neighborhood. As all brownstones do, it has an air of regality to it, just tarnished and weathered enough by weather and time to feel real.

This one in particular is a townhouse with an elegant limestone façade, last renovated in 2006. Ownership to the property goes to one Mr. De Luca, a man with robust underground connections.

It just might have some leftover Chitauri tech buried in there, somewhere. Only one way to find out.

Lucky for them, New York City is expecting rough, heavy rain the very next Tuesday. Peter had been able anticipate it days ahead, the promise of thunder and lightning in the angry winds and gray skies that persisted since last week. Any power outage that just so happens to take out any security cameras will be chalked up to flooded equipment.

Water is pelting down on Peter’s back. He’s quietly thankful that the Spider-man suit is waterproof and that this high-ranking mafia guy has a taste for rooftop gardening. Easy access into the building.

“Okay. The storm is picking up. Going off of older footage, the housekeeper comes on Thursdays or Sundays, and De Luca shouldn’t be back for another hour,” Tony says. “We’re cutting the power in twenty seconds. Stay alert and keep quiet. He might have security features that aren’t connected to the city’s grids.”

“Copy that, Mr. Iron Man,” Peter says. “In position.”

“That’s Mr. Iron Man _sir_ to you,” Tony’s voice crackles through the comm link, and then the connection goes quiet.

Peter switches his HUD to infrared and slips inside. Despite usually never carrying much equipment, this mission called for a utility belt that hangs low on his hips, with all the things Tony had placed in his paper bag—an old-fashioned toolbox, some probes and scanners.

Water drips to the carpeted floor below as Peter crawls along the ceiling, hoping that the liquid evaporates before De Luca takes notice.

For the first few thorough checks through the townhouse Peter’s scanner doesn’t detect any high-energy radiation. Even the basement’s boiler room, which, when Peter puts on his “if I were in the mafia and hiding a highly illegal alien weapon in my fancy house, where would I put it?” thinking cap, is disappointingly scarce of said highly illegal alien weapon.

After twenty minutes of silence, Tony reopens the line.

“Is everything alright?” he asks. When Peter hums an affirmative, follows up with, “Have you found anything?”

“Not yet,” Peter says.

“Okay,” Tony says, keeping his tone neutral. “We’re following De Luca’s car. It looks like he’s just finished dropping some goods off and is skedaddling back as soon as that’s done. There’s a chance I’ll ask you to fall back earlier than anticipated.”

“Got it,” Peter replies. Then mutes the connection, and exhales, slow and deep.

Breathe—one, two. Stay on task; don’t get frustrated.

Three, four, five. Breathe.

De Luca must be decently smart. All that means is that Peter has to be smarter.

There’s a swirling feeling in his gut, the familiar hum of his senses under the plates of his skull. Something is amiss.

Peter falls to a crouch and shines a flashlight on the wooden floorboards. The screws nailing the floorboards down are a bit tarnished. He taps the ground with the heel of his foot, listening to the vibrations, the creak of the planks. It’s fruitless for a while until Peter turns back around to the area surrounding the boiler.

Nails with an umbrella head roofing instead of the flat ones in use by the rest of the basement.

 _Bingo_.

Fishing out a mini hammer from one of his belt pouches, Peter makes quick work of setting the boards aside, revealing a smooth sheet of metal.

“Well shit,” he whispers. “That’s why the scanners weren’t picking up on anything.”

Peter presses a probe against the surface and waits for Karen to process the signal.

“Hardness 298 HB. Searching databases now,” she says, after a moment of pause. “Search complete. Best match: tungsten, estimated 97% purity.”

Peter _tap tap taps_ his knuckles against the metal. “This is good enough to hypothetically block hypothetical X-rays from a hypothetical Chitauri gun, dontch’a think so?” he says.

“I agree, Peter.”

“Aw. I love you, Kare-bear. We make a great team.”

Less than ten minutes later, more floorboards are pried up, screws in a careful pile by his thigh. With deft fingers, the hatch—of one of the _three_ hidden guns, _fuck yes_ —protecting the energy cell clicks open.

The Chitauri ore is a dense weight in Peter’s gloved hands, warm to the touch like an overworked processor. It’s not the first time he’s held one of these things, heavy and with delicate swirls of violet and purple, but it feels like striking gold.

__

“Heeey FBI! You missed a spot.” Peter holds the one of the crystalline stones up, grinning like a loon. “I guess you could say that I _rock_.”

Tony rolls his eyes, but he’d given Peter, like, ten shoulder pats. “I’ll let that one go because I’m impressed,” he says. “But put that thing back in the case and hand it to the agents over there. You know, instead of dangling a radioactive rock in our faces. We’ll grab a bite to eat before I have to send you back to your aunt; there’s a 24-hour diner nearby.”

Sometimes Peter forgets that he’s a bit more radiation-resistant than most. The woes of being a mutant. “Oh my God, sorry,” he says, sheepish, and does as asked.

__

Peter doesn’t think himself as a stiff person. There are moments, of course, but everyone has _moments_ , and his always translate to swings and kicks and action. Action through both peaceful and violent days, the rain and sleet.

But there’s something about how every head had turned in eerie unison as he stepped foot into the practice room. When flight or fight are options, Peter rarely goes with _freeze_.

Everyone is staring and Peter is so abruptly nervous that it startles him.

Then, they all turn back around just as quickly, looking away.

Peter realizes that everyone in this room knows some version of him, but he doesn’t even know their names—he knows Flash, he knows Ned, and Michelle counts as a familiar face.

But beyond that, though—no one. He’s never bothered trying, before, and now he has nothing to work with.

Ned is running late, so Peter can’t even use him as a social buffer—instead, he settles on stuffing his fists into the front pocket of his hoodie and making himself small.

Logically he knows it’s not a big deal, that everyone else has internal lives that aren’t founded on their opinions of him but sometimes he can’t help it and he barely resists the urge to squirm. Old habits die hard and snarling the entire way.

As he slides down into his seat, the chatter in the classroom gradually resumes. He sees Michelle a few chairs away, playing a game on her phone.

The air smells like the stale wood of pencil shavings and lemon-scented cleaner and Michelle notices Peter looking her way. She glances up at him, face blank.

Peter’s guts sink down his abdomen, coiling and straining against gravity and he tries for a smile, because that’s the polite thing to do.

He has the cognizance to know that it’s stupid reaction; he doesn’t feel this way with semiautomatics pointed at him, doesn’t feel this way joking around with strangers on the streets.

Michelle goes back to her game.

By the time Ned clambers into the room, out of breath from running from one end of the building to the other, the familiar coil of anxiety is already tight and straining.

It loosens as they begin practice, running through a round of mathematics. Then chemistry. The answers come to him and he doesn’t have to think about anything except to dig around his brain for answers and the quick scribble of equations on scrap paper.

Nothing goes wrong. In fact, it goes comically well.

Peter’s inauguration into Midtown’s Academic Decathlon team is ultimately met with minimal opposition and fanfare. Afterwards, Peter slumps against his seat on the train. _That actually went okay_ , he thinks. He tried something new and life goes on.

__

In no time at all Peter realizes that Michelle has every single AcaDec member’s school schedules memorized. Peter had been under the impression that Michelle just plain didn’t care what he was up to beyond being punctual, but within the second week of knowing her she somehow knows he’s taking statistics and comparative government—and he’s pretty sure he’s never brought those topics up with Ned.

“She’s just like that,” Ned says, helpful as always.

Peter gets added to the team groupchat before his first competition with another school in Queens. On the bus, he loads the thread’s image history and tries to see if anyone had sent in their timetables at any point, but all he finds is hyper-specific memes he assumes he’ll understand in time and zero-point-zero answers.

He also finds an absolute gem of an exchange from just a few days ago, starting with a picture of Flash posing cross-legged on the hood of a fancy car, aviators perched on his head and head purposefully turned away from the cameraman to look thoughtful. Probably sent it to the wrong people by accident.

Cindy Moon had replied with _flash we all kno u drive an audi whose porsche r u posing on_ , while Michelle had followed up with _i bet you’d do numbers on tinder, eugene_.

Peter fails to suppress a smile at that. Then, finger pressed against Flash’s photo, he selects the thumbs-down option.

Is it petty? Maybe.

Is Peter already utterly sick of hearing Flash calling him Penis at least once every ten minutes, thinking he’s being all _sotto voce_ and shit? Certainly. Flash is being totally immature on top of uncreative, and does Peter really, _really_ need to be the bigger person all the time?

Nah.

Rancorous and phallic nicknames aside, AcaDec is fun. Peter is happy to spend extra time with Ned and everyone else is actually pretty nice. He’s figuring out that it’s okay that they don’t seem to know how to talk to him just yet; it’s mutual.

Gradually, he learns their names and where they stand within the group. There’s not really much of a power hierarchy, but if Michelle wants the room’s attention, everyone defers to her without any protest.

Michelle clearly prefers to be a spectator as much as possible, retreating to the fringes of the group whenever she has nothing to contribute. She’s a capable captain nonetheless, even if she doesn’t lead in the sunny way Peter imagines Liz once had.

Casually and _aggressively_ competent are descriptors Peter can easily assign her. Impatient, too; he watches Michelle unceremoniously dump everything out her backpack in search for a specific quiz packet. In the process, a small tin falls out and makes impact with the floor. Its contents—several sticks of artist charcoals—scatter in every direction. 

A good stretch of silence passes, Michelle staring down at the mess she made before she lets out a deep breath.

“Whoops,” she says, free of inflection, and kneels down to pick up her stuff like the very idea exhausts her.

Peter stoops under the desks too and finds two out of four sticks, gathering them carefully in his left hand. They’re brittle and thankfully unbroken, waxy to the touch. Using them must require a careful hand, gentle but controlled.

To his left, Peter finds the lid. Specks of paint on the edges of the container have corroded away, but Peter can still make out the text; it’s a vintage cocaine pastilles tin.

Michelle’s fingers brush against his palm as she collects her supplies back. “Thanks,” she says.

She has no discernible organizational system to speak of—the contents of her bag amount to a fat stack of papers made up of class handouts and scrap paper in no particular order—and it takes her another two minutes to find the right printouts. Not like Peter’s one to judge. He sees Betty shudder, though.

The soot and smoke give a gritty feel to the skin of his hand. The rest of practice is spent fielding physics questions and staring at the charcoal stains on his fingers.

__

Ned has officially extended an invite to Peter to sit with him and Michelle during lunch. With some reluctance, he does. He just keeps an eye on his tray, or Ned, and tries not to look at Michelle too much.

She eats a sour key about 60% of the time and has a thing for stone fruits. She always sits across from them, quiet unless Ned specifically addresses her.

That’s how Peter finds himself listening to her opinions on one of the sophomore-level novel studies they’d had to do last year.

Spoilers: she has a bitter grudge.

“Here’s the thing, though,” Michelle says, the seventh time Peter had joined her and Ned in the canteen. Her hands are moving around and she’s shooting lasers into her limp tuna melt. “You can’t make the case that the main character is an universal everyman on the sole basis that he’s middle class and rotting away as a corporate drone—and that it is this virtue of his character that makes the story charming, or relatable or whatever—in a school where most of us will never be that person because we’re not white or a man. It’s a stupid argument to make _which is why no one made it_ —and, ugh. I cannot believe he accused us of not ‘engaging with the novel enough to make the connection’ as if he were talking to a bunch of dumbasses. He’s the one reaching.”

“Bro,” Ned says. “I love it when you roast Mr. Smith.”

Michelle scrubs her temples. She sighs. “I _hate_ him.”

Public American schooling, she argues, is far too myopic and puts in nowhere near the acceptable amount of effort into encouraging critical thinking because it’s this kind of undereducation that makes plutocracy and nepotism so easy to preserve. But at the very least it makes churning out essays a relatively straightforward process.

Then, as if she’d exceeded her word limit for the week, Michelle resumes her Tetris game and is completely silent for the next half hour.

Once Ned goes back to busying himself with his own platter of disgusting cafeteria food, Peter discreetly opens a new note on his phone and types out the words and concepts Michelle brought up that he didn’t quite recognize. He’s gonna search the terms up later; it feels weird to being part of a discussion with so little to contribute.

__

Most of the time, Michelle has an air of calm about her that Peter envies. It’s not from a lack of emotions, he knows; Liz would not have hand-picked Michelle for a leadership position if she hadn’t seen any drive—and Michelle very obviously cares more than she tends to let on in her own roundabout, aloof way.

Meanwhile, Peter wonders if he’s ever relaxed once in all the springs and autumns of his little life. He’d love to relax one day. It does sound like a hoot and a half.

Maybe he can count the time earlier in this year when a metric fuckton of drugs burst into flames at the GCT port. Peter, lacking any sort of respirator, had laid down, blissed out on a shipping container and had marvelled how pretty all the colours of the sky were. 

__

One week, the usual AcaDec meeting is made optional because they’d just gone through a rough round of scrimmages, leaving any brain matter the team had halfway fried and in need of a break. Ned goes anyway and drags Peter along, so he uses the time to make some progress on his Spanish grammar worksheets.

He’s also suffering the aftermath of a hard hit to the shoulder, wincing every so often. Ned is sending him _Looks_.

Jasmine—not Yasmin, Yasmin is the one that likes wearing dangly earrings shaped like fruits, Jasmine has obsidian hair in a bob—is also here, lamenting her physics grade to Abe. Something about absolutely bombing her electromagnetism exam, _my life is over, I’m going to drop out of high school and die alone._ She’s gone full soliloquy and Michelle’s nose is scrunched up behind her book, betraying what Peter identifies as irritation.

Michelle’s wearing glasses today—so she must normally use contacts, because this is the first time Peter’s seen her with them on. The frames are black and wire-thin, molded around large round lenses. Maybe she’s tired and her eyes are sore; school’s busy this week. Peter hopes she’s not overdoing it. 

It looks nice, though. The glasses. Modern, not too fancy.

Peter watches Michelle vacate any emotion from her face and pull out a pastry from her backpack. She gets out of her seat, the ends of her chair squealing unpleasantly before she makes her way over to where Jasmine is overturned like an oil spill on her desk.

Michelle drops the pastry in front of her.

“It’s one test,” she says flatly. “You’ll do better next time.”

Jasmine twists in her seat, staring up at her captain in surprise. “Oh! You don’t have to, seriously, I’m just being dramatic—”

Michelle sends her an absolutely gelid glower that translates to _Take it. I will debone you._

“No,” she says.

“It’s your Danish, you should keep it,” Jasmine insists.

“No. It’s apricot.”

__

Tragedy strikes: Ned is sick.

This news reaches him near the tail end of chem class. Ned had been a no-show and Peter couldn’t even bother with his usual cycle of losing consciousness and jolting back awake. He’d been too busy glancing at the doorway waiting for the other boy to show up.

But alas.

Now he’s in the cafeteria Peter is drumming his fingers against his lunch, body partially hidden among the crowd of teenagers, the roar of hundreds of different conversations and a well-placed pillar.

He risks poking his head out to steal a glance at his, Ned’s and Michelle’s table. Michelle has already set herself up in her usual spot, notebook and a novel open while her tray of food is pushed slightly off to the side. No glasses today, but she does hold back a yawn.

Does—does he go ahead and sit down even though Ned isn’t here? Michelle can be a little prickly, sure, but it doesn’t come with any malice. Peter really has to work at not navigating every social situation like a minefield, because if he’s learned anything in the past two months it’s that nothing about socializing in high school is ever all that serious. He knows he’s being silly and overthinks too much, but courage is a fickle thing and—oh. Oh boy she sees him.

Oh God she’s waving.

Baby steps bring him closer to her. One foot and then the other. They exchange a stilted pair of greetings before Peter asks, “Do you mind if I sit here?”

Michelle looks at him like he’s a tad slow. “You sit here every day,” she says.

But. But Ned’s always there. Ned’s her friend, so she lets Peter sit with them. He’s not here today. “I can sit somewhere else,” he blurts out. If she wants.

“What?” Michelle says. “Like you’re gonna eat alone on the stairs again?”

She’s clearly trying to joke, judging by how she’s dialed up the incredulity on her face, but he replies with, “Uh, yeah?”

Oh, come on, Peter. That just sounds sad. Self-deprecation isn’t trendy anymore. It’s all, like, positive vibes and healthy thought patterns these days.

Michelle’s nostrils flare up. “Chill,” she says, and instructs him to sit.

Peter does. “Thanks, Michelle,” he says. He’s still tense and faintly mortified, but it’s ebbing away.

Then, Michelle surprises him again. “My friends call me MJ,” she says.

And. Alright.

“Sure,” he says.

They’re friends. Cool.

He can do that. He can totally do that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> peter... u loser....
> 
> yes the oregon humongous fungus is real. i learned about it 3 hours ago


	3. just a city boy

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> content warnings: one scene includes descriptions of dissociation + some violence. 
> 
> for the eagle-eyed: yeah i extended the chapter count because i got way too carried away here. this update is long kddkfjnvdfk i was aiming for 6.5K words per chapter and then got this 9K beast instead. ah.

Peter is a bit of a jerk. 

He’s perched on a roof overlooking lower Manhattan, halfway through a coke slurpee—post-patrol cooldown—when he comes to an epiphany: his anxiety needs to take a hike, get mauled by a bear and _die_.

Today he had a perfectly good interaction with Michelle and the only one making things difficult had been him and his dumb brain.

Ned had pushed him into his and MJ’s little circle and she hadn’t seemed miffed about it—he’d just operated under the pretense that she would be, intentionally or not. They’ve both been trying with him in their own ways when they absolutely didn’t have to and while Peter hadn’t been assuming the _worst_ about MJ, he’d thought from the get-go that she’d be… colder.

Peter has never claimed not to have a proclivity for dramatics.

Abe says hi to him in the halls now. Jasmine is in his stats class and makes a point to tell him hello even though they sit at opposite ends of the classroom. That’s not nothing.

He’s Spider-man. Chirping and needling his opponents is his _thing_. He can make digs to Tony Stark and pull a fast one on cops night after night. That’s not nothing. 

If Spider-man can do it, he thinks, Midtown’s Peter Parker can absolutely manage it too. He wonders why he’s such a different person under the mask and at home and at school.

He supposes everyone is, but the divide for him is a larger berth than most—Spider-man is a _superhero_ —but maybe some of that boldness can bleed into his civilian persona.

He’ll be better; no more cowardly lion. No more Ned-come-pick-me-up-I’m-scared.

“You’re insecure,” Peter sings, off-key because there are no witnesses, “don’t know what for. You’re turning heads when you walk through the—”

“Sweet mother of pearl! Fire on the poop deck!” Karen chimes, pulling Peter out of his reverie so abruptly he nearly drops his drink down twenty stories of brick. God, _why_ did he program her to say that? Does he think he’s funny? “Hit and run headed your way, 38th Eastbound in a red Honda Civic. Most likely a drunk driver, two pedestrians injured—”

“Yikes,” Peter says, fully alert now. “Okay, okay. Just gimme one second.”

Peter slurps up the last third of his drink in one loud, inhumanely large gulp, leaving behind a dilute bottom-layer of ice.

Then he hurls himself down twenty-one floors in a corkscrew spin to get some momentum going—because he’s cool like that.

Nothing quite like an old-fashioned high-speed chase to wrap up the night in a pretty bow. 

In no time, he spots what appears to be the correct vehicle mid-swing, the noise of police sirens faint enough to still be blocks behind.

“Alright,” Peter mutters, grinning under his mask, heart rate picking up. Wrist aimed for his next shot of webbing, in three, two… “How about I smash this dick’s windshield in?”

__

“Karen, which roof was I on earlier?” Peter asks, brushing shards of glass off of his suit. “The one I left my slurpee on.”

Spider-man has standards; he does not litter.

“Mapping coordinates now.”

__

“The problem,” Peter says, placing his hand over his chest and balancing his weight on an aged wooden chair, “is me.”

He and Ned are at the library again. They have an exam on cellular respiration tomorrow; the contents of Peter’s biology binder is an indecipherable mess of poorly drawn lines and letters. Ned could also use the extra time studying, considering the hours he’d already lost recovering from his cold.

“Sure it is,” Ned replies easily, tapping his pencil against his nose, and Peter juts out his bottom lip. “But, uh, do you wanna elaborate?”

“I don’t think I’ve been fair to MJ,” Peter says, very pointedly ignoring how Ned had reacted to him using her nickname. “She’s been nice—” he frowns when Ned snorts, “but I kept assuming she only tolerated having me around. For, uh. You.”

Ned shrugs. “Trust me when I say that she would, one, not be offended over something so minor. And two: bold of you to assume MJ would tolerate _anything_ for my sake,” he says, squinting at his notes. “Hey. How important is knowing the smaller details of the Krebs cycle? I think my head is gonna explode.”

“It’s just extra material,” Peter assures him. “For your viewing pleasure.”

Ned makes a face. “Eugh, thank God. This is disgusting.”

And that’s that.

__

With last year’s seniors long gone, performing arts and drama have been left without adequate student tech support. The winter musical is in less than two months away and within one practice rehearsal Peter’s inner nerd is _this_ close to having a conniption at how some these theatre kids are handling their mics.

So now he’s the primary mainstay at the tech booth. The PA teacher, Mr. Collins, hesitantly lets him help for what Peter supposes is two reasons: it’s been nearly two years since his last out-of-school suspension and his monetary fines from sophomore year were completely waived on account of good grades.

(Apparently truancy is a criminal offense? Hah. The more you know.

God, how did May not throw him out a window last year?)

 _It’s such a… pleasant surprise to see you working past your behavioural issues and finally taking advantage of, ah, your bright future, Mr. Parker,_ Mr. Collins had said, slowly, like he didn’t believe his own phrasing.

It was a very uncomfortable conversation.

Mr. Collins aside, having access backstage is pretty sweet; it has an entire couch—new nap spot!—and at least three stashes of junk food Peter now has access to as long as he contributes to the snack fund.

They’re performing _The Nutcracker and the Mouse King_ this year. Peter vaguely remembers the storyline from one of those Barbie animated adaptations that would air on cable during the holiday season. One way or another, Peter also ends up helping with stitching up costumes too; he’d made his first suit by himself, after all. Sitting criss-cross applesauce in a circle backstage, he and the three other costume designers share stories on what got them into crafting. Some of them took home economics in middle school and it had spiralled into a hobby while others picked it up from tutorial videos on YouTube. While pinning golden epaulets to an old Goodwill jacket, Peter tells them he had learned from Ben.

He also gets a handful of new numbers keyed into his contacts, which is pretty awesome too.

__

Peter is a man on a mission.

He’s going to do something nice for MJ. A grand gesture of friendship. He’s going to do it.

“Maybe,” Peter says, ruminating, foot tapping the ground and finger tapping his chin in tandem. He’s staring up at the row of peach candies slung along the length of a metal hook, nestled among bags of gummy bears and Swedish fish. Some old power ballad is playing from the ceiling, piano riff and lyrics raw with heartache being cut off by an intercom announcement for a spill cleanup in aisle seven. “Maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe…”

May sidles up next to Peter and does the hard part: grabbing the bag of peach sours and dropping it into their shopping cart.

“Do you want another one?” she asks, amused.

Peter shakes his head, pursing his lips shut.

__

Peter needs to play it cool, so he tries to mirror what MJ did with Jasmine and the apricot Danish. With the thinly veiled disgruntlement dialed down a few notches, of course.

There are six peach gummies secured in a plastic pouch, all dyed a cheerful sunset orange and dusted liberally with sugar. He drops them in front of her and nods her way.

“They were on sale?” Peter explains when MJ picks the bag up to give them an inquiring shake. Like the lying liar he is. “So I had some extras, and I figured you’d like some.”

“Peachy,” MJ says, already undoing the knot tying the package shut.

With a delay Peter realizes MJ had just made a joke. Is it lame if he laughs a bit late? Actually, he’ll just wait until next time—oh, she’s smiling. That’s happening.

“Thanks,” MJ tells him.

Peter is killing it.

__

Once upon a time, Peter wore his goofiest shirts as pyjamas.

They were silly. They made Peter laugh back when he was four and it was starting to sink in that Mom and Dad weren't coming back. Ben would pull out a too-big graphic tee and explain what _Never trust an atom, they make up everything!_ meant and when it clicked Ben would grin a big happy grin and pull the shirt down Peter’s head. Peter, swamped in cotton and too excited to go sleep, would adhere like lichen to Ben’s leg and beg to be taught more, only to crash on the couch not twenty minutes later.

Digging through boxes that haven’t been touched since he and May moved to their newer apartment, Peter finds thin a, worn t-shirt. It’s old—probably one of the first in Ben’s corny clothing line, but the white of the fabric is still remarkably bright and the print, red and bold, is intact.

Peter smooths the shirt so that the hem loops around his hips. It fits perfectly. It used to be so big.

His growth spurt post-spider bite had been so pronounced and abrupt that Peter’s back still has the stretch marks to show for it. His shoulders have filled out and there is muscle on his bones.

 _Nerd_ , Peter mouths to his reflection. Across his chest is a pepperoni pizza, the formula for area, for the arc length.

His stare-down with the mirror lasts another minute before Peter exhales and leaves the washroom. The train to Midtown leaves at 7:18.

__

MJ calls him out on the sudden fashion change, but then she asks him, in her own way, to keep it up.

Peter grins a big happy grin and doesn’t register the weight of her stare.

__

“Honestly,” Cindy Moon is saying to him, “you’re not scary at all.”

Room 207 is quiet today, the cool fall winds and the high-pitched warbles of European starlings streaming through the windows. Within the near future looms, like a pesky shadow, several important scrimmages that’ll serve as a good litmus test to see if Midtown will progress past regionals next semester.

If they beat enough schools within the district, they’ll make the state competition. Peter can see MJ practically salivating at the thought—which is to say that she’s already levelled up the difficulty of her drills and is tallying up scores live on her calculator while doling out questions at the same time. It’s quite the sight.

Some Brooklyn team is coming to Queens in a few days, and after that will come a bigger series of faceoffs hosted at an ESU facility. MJ has old bones to pick against one of the rival team’s captains—there’d been a noodle incident of sorts last year that had earned him the high honour of being addressed solely as _Stuyvesant bitch_ , emphasis on the B.

At present, Peter puts his attention back to Cindy, who is watching him expectantly. “Um, thank you? I think,” he replies.

Cindy nods enthusiastically. “You are super welcome!” She grins and gestures broadly to… all of him. “Like, even your outfit. You used to be all dark hoodie, gloomy vibes! Now you’re dressed like you’re third chair clarinet in band.”

Peter looks down at his outfit a little self-consciously. _Of quartz I love geology_ is printed over his chest in deep blue. It’s definitely one of his weaker shirts; Peter is no aspiring rock expert, but Ben probably just thought the design was cute or something.

“I mean, that’s not exactly a bad thing,” Cindy amends. “You just look like a nerd. With a whole catalogue of Star Trek shirts.”

Cindy said Star Trek. _Star Trek_? “No,” he hears himself say because he is obligated to on principle, “I own four Star _Wars_ t-shirts—I counted them last week—”

Ned cuts him off. “Okay, we have been _over this_ , both franchises were equally important pioneers in shaping pop culture today. This is literally indisputable.”

Peter scowls. “Whose side are you o—”

A faint wheeze comes from MJ’s direction.

Peter turns sharply to where MJ is seated, previously lost in a pocket of reality where it was just her and her frankly terrifying pile of flashcards. She covers what might have been a laugh with an awkward cough, bringing her hand up to her face under the pretext of pushing her glasses back up the bridge of her nose. No eye contact is made.

Peter crosses his arms. “We’re all here for an academic decathlon meeting and our uniforms are literally canary yellow.”

“I didn’t pick them. Don’t drag me into this,” MJ murmurs, still slightly pink.

“I would never,” Peter reassures her before turning back to Cindy, who is watching the exchange with rapt attention and some degree of delight, “and, uh, back in middle school I played the trumpet. They said it was the best instrument for building lung capacity since I had really bad asthma and stuff. If I played woodwind I would have gone with an oboe; the band teacher told me clarinet or saxophone would have been too risky, because my lungs had the integrity of a plastic bag.”

Silence.

“WHAT?” Cindy shouts. “You were actually in band? You’re asthmatic? But—but dude. Dude, how does that even work? You’re ripped, no offense. You look like a varsity swimmer. Have you seen your arms?”

“Hmm,” MJ hums, one hand propping up her chin, the other holding a slip with _Where is the Taklamakan Desert?_ written in messy block script. Her eyes flicker over to Peter, sweeping up-down from the plane of his shoulders to the tip of his boots. 

Alright. Sure.

Beside him, Ned lets out the world’s fakest, most exaggerated gasp. “I heard Peter Parker has an eight-pack,” he says conspiratorially.

“That Peter is shredded,” MJ deadpans.

Cindy’s awe is raw on her face.

“I mean, I haven’t had an asthma attack in years?” Peter tries and he can feel his ears going hot. The spider bite really did some miraculous factory reset on his body.

“What the fuck. The _duality_ ,” Cindy whispers. She brings her hands to the sides of her head. “I need time to process this.”

“Be quick about it,” MJ says, “we’re doing world geography in two minutes.”

__

“I understand why you’re worried, sweetheart, I do,” May argues one night, drying her hands with a towel. There are three newly cleaned dishes drying on the rack.

“ _Do you?_ ” Peter fires back from where he’s draped over the couch. And yikes; that’s not fair. That was _so_ not fair.

May barely looks askance, lips in a firm line, but there is kindling in her eyes, the beginning of a fire. “There is,” she continues, “no need to forfeit something as simple as having a friend over in your home because you go out of your way to make the city a better place. You’re only a kid—”

“I’m sixteen—” 

“You are a _child_ ,” May says, so calm.

She takes the few steps needed in their small apartment to cross over from the kitchen to the living area. Meticulous with the way she moves.

“You’re a child and this is not me looking down on you, this is not me saying you don’t know better, or that _what_ you say bears less weight. God. It even scares me, knowing how smart you are,” she’s telling him. “You patrol so much you’re basically working an additional 40-hour week. I know you’re getting enough calories. I know you’re sleeping more. I know your GPA is looking good this semester. So don’t you think—don’t you think at this point you deserve to wind down and actually be a kid? Do something that doesn’t involve helping other people—that’s just for _you_?”

Peter frowns.

And the truth is slipping into a mask with white lenses and the weight of his webshooters pressing down on his wrists is what furloughs the unease of knowing May works irregular shifts and often comes home late, when the streets are blanketed with the muted hush of ill-intent. The truth is sometimes the unease heightens to terror and the metallic tang of the Ben’s blood stiffening into his palm lines. Caking into grooves of his nails. 

The truth is Peter hardly remembers that he was screaming—he just knows he had been. The sirens, the flash and burn of the emergency lights, being hoisted to his feet by a stranger, all the voices trying to break through the tar where Peter had nearly drowned—it is all an incoherent spatter, a mess in his mind.

But he remembers the tepid salt in his mouth from his own tears. The smell of iron in his nostrils. He could never forget. 

The truth is the icy press of a gun muzzle to his temple paled in comparison to the sight of Adrian Toomes smiling, all teeth, and the sinuous croon of _I’ll kill you, and everyone you love._

 _You understand?_

He does. He really, really does.

_Close to the vest. I admire that. I got some secrets of my own. Now; what do you say?_

_Thank you._

“Peter?” May is saying, and she sounds far away. Shit. “Petey, sweetheart.”

Peter hurriedly shakes himself out of it, waving away the smog and sulfur. “Yes,” he says.

“You zoned out for a sec, buddy.”

“Oh.” It’s been a while since that’s happened. Fucking hell. “Um. Sorry.”

May pulls him close, and he gulps down an uncomfortable weight in his throat. “No. It’s okay,” she says, holding his face. “No need to apologize.”

Her hands are chilly and damp from being under the spray of the kitchen sink, thumbs tracing the arch of his cheekbones. The metal of her rings is even colder. She smells like flowers; she smells of lavender, of life. And he’s here. With May, in their home. They just had dinner together.

Peter is unsure how much time passes before May speaks again. “I’m just asking you to try,” she hums. “Think about it like this: inviting your friends here, into your life—is not the same as laying yourself bare. It doesn’t mean you have to open yourself up completely, especially not right away. It just means you get to spend time with them outside of school and share pizza. Doesn’t sound big, right?”

“Mmm-hm,” Peter says noncommittally. “I’ll think about it.”

They decide to do it on a Thursday. A baby step, a remarkable bound.

May gets to meet Ned, but not MJ; she can’t come because she has work. Wednesdays don’t work either—Ned has to skedaddle right after AcaDec meetings, and Peter’s Monday afternoons are now used up backstage with the theatre kids whenever the streets seem calmer. He promises that eventually they’ll find a time slot where all three of them are available.

Peter sees Ned looking pensively at the basket of first-aid supplies stashed under the coffee table. He pokes at the cacti and air plants scattered here and there while Peter tells Ned all of their names.

“May just got this one a while ago because she has no self-control,” Peter says, pointing to their newest addition, a tiny golden barrel. “It doesn’t have a name yet. Wanna do the honours?”

“Jean-Luc,” Ned offers. Like, without hesitation.

“Oh for God’s sake.”

Ned whacks him on the back.

They settle down and build a quarter of the Death Star from the kit Ned had hauled to the apartment—which is actually so cool, these sets are worth a minor organ—and they agree to leave it in Peter’s room so they can keep going the next time Ned visits.

Next time. That sounds nice.

__

It’s a Thursday night, temperate and open. The autumn foliage—once a brilliant flood of warm colour—is now dull, rotting under outsoles and bike tires, burning a hole into November. Atop a taller building bordering Manhattan’s lower East side, Peter pulls up his mask just enough that it uncovers his nose, taking in generous gulps of cool air. His HUD reads 11:12; that should give him a few minutes to take it easy and let the wind dry off the sweat clinging to his back.

Peter is mentally mapping out the route home in his head—he’s about equidistant between the Williamsburg and Manhattan bridges. MJ was talking about the Manhattan bridge a while ago, about how early construction efforts in excavating the East River’s bedrock had led to the death of three construction workers.

“Nothing compared to the Brooklyn bridge, though,” MJ had been saying. “The guy who designed the bridge, this German engineer, died of tetanus before construction even started because a boat crushed his toes. His son had to take over the project. Then you get to the part where workers had to dig into the river with explosives, and the underwater pressure was so great that it crippled hundreds, including the first engineer’s son. The only reason why the dude got to keep his position after that is because his wife campaigned for him not to get fired.”

MJ is AcaDec captain for a reason.

If he budgets his time well, Peter will be home, showered and passed out in bed before midnight. Exciting stuff, because he is genuinely wrung out—it’s only Thursday but this week has been nothing but a long line of quiz here, exam there, oh, let’s make class discussions mandatory in comparative government so Peter can listen to some Very Confusing Takes.

Getting back on topic, _sleep_. Spider-man wants to sleep, and he has damn well earned it.

Due to who he is as a person, of course, he doesn’t:

At 11:20 Peter gets enough of listening to the nighttime traffic. The NYPD audio feed has offered nothing of note, so he starts up one of his post-patrol Spotify playlists and stretches.

At 11:21 Peter shoots a web Northeast, traversing the few blocks needed to reach the Bridge that Killed Three People Before It Even Existed.

At 11:22, while approaching Park Row, the first chorus of an absolute banger is just coming to a close when his senses go off. Peter has to physically restrain himself from groaning. The usual shrill siren song of police car rumblers is absent, so Peter mutes his music and begins circling the area in a game of hot or cold with his powers.

At times like this Peter wishes his spider senses felt less like generalized anxiety and… more candid with the _point_.

At 11:24 Peter’s eyes are roving line after line of asphalt roads, swinging westward, when they finally snag on an armored SUV parked along the roadside, near some construction site. It’s a decently busy area and the car is nondescript enough that most wouldn’t do so much as give it a passing glance. Around is a big selection of corner stores and business establishments, plus two cheap motels.

His senses say, _Warm. Warmer._

Peter lands on the side of an off-white building, its façade made of smooth, tarnished stone, keeping away from the lights cast by the aberrant flow of cars. From this angle, he has a decent view of one side of the motel stairwells, but he pulls up whatever CCTV is available as a widget on the right corner of his HUD.

Then he waits.

At 11:32 a shadowed mound lands feet-first on the motel roof and immediately falls into a crouch, obscuring themselves from view. Peter climbs higher—whoever this is, they’re decently tall, slender, and decked out in Kevlar.

This is setting up to be a fantabulous time. 

He nor Karen can make out a face—they’re wearing these red-tinted googles, like the compound eyes of a fly.

“Hey,” Peter says under his breath, “this town ain’t big enough for two critter-themed weirdos.”

Karen can’t run any recognition on body language or gait because, well. They’re not exactly moving.

One of the motel suite lights flicker to life.

The shadow moves.

“Do you have the license plate of that SUV saved?” Peter asks Karen in a soft whisper. They can start there. “Run a search, please.”

Here’s the thing about Tony’s personal tech: it’s sophisticated, efficient and brutally aggressive when it wants answers. Ultimately, Peter would get by without it, but access to a head-spinning number of databases and backdoors do a damn fine job at streamlining the crimefighting process. And it’s fast—so when Karen is still buffering, five seconds later and fly-face is gradually shifting closer and closer to that fourth-story awning, Peter mumbles, “You got anything yet?”

“Sorry for the delay, Peter,” Karen says, “but I do not have the security clearance required to access such information.” 

Huh. That’s… strange.

Something which, under less time-sensitive circumstances Peter should probably avoid sticking his nose into.

Spidey _like_.

“Well, I’m kind of watching someone covered head-to-toe with body armour and an assault rifle strapped to their back, so, uh… Sorry, Karen. Proxy it through FRIDAY,” Peter says, limbs thrumming with something akin to excitement, “override code tau-alpha-tau, war-machine sixty-eight.”

Nothing happens.

“Um, the E in machine is a three?”

Karen’s maroon HUD transitions to the sleek ultramarine that adorns every hologram in Tony’s labs, and a fluid, Irish voice greets him. “Access granted. Welcome, Mr. Parker,” FRIDAY says.

Clearance shmearance. Peter laughs. “Heya, FRI. What’s going on over—oh woah oh fuck they’re headed for the window, okay, very bad timing—”

Peter ricochets himself across the street, accosting the probably-merc with a classic “Sorry to drop in!” and a kick that theoretically should knock them off balance enough to make them lose grip of the ledge so Peter can break their fall with a cocoon of webbing and be on his way—except their knee doesn’t give.

The impact feels like striking reinforced steel, which, even under layers of Kevlar or whatever else, should not—

The merc stares at him with their huge red goggles right as FRIDAY launches into an explanation. “John Doe, legal identity withheld,” she recites, ever so calm, “filed a third-party whistleblower complaint regarding—”

Peter dodges a lightning fast punch, half-heartedly wonders if his HUD is glitching, because holy crapsack that is a _lot_ of Newtons. Easily within the orders of magnitude that show up for moving cars.

 _Enhanced_. SHIELD will need to contain this person once Peter wrangles them.

Peter falls back just as the first clumps of rubble and dust fall to the ground below. There are already bystanders with their phones out, very much not a safe distance away.

“Mr. Doe is scheduled for a private hearing in Washington D.C. tomorrow at 10 AM EST.”

That makes sense. They’re in lower Manhattan and this motel isn’t too far from a tunnel that connects straight to New Jersey. Travelling in broad daylight ensures the safety of a crowd, of witnesses.

First order of business: get that assault rifle. Keep them away from the window and away from John Doe. 

Easier said than done; Peter swings below the spot the merc is still grappled to the wall to get behind them and makes a hasty grab for the gun. That part happens with surprisingly little resistance and Peter has ten-ish pounds of deadly weapon in his hands when he sees the merc dig through their utility belt.

“Oooh,” Peter says as realization dawns on him. “ _Two_ guns. Smort.”

“I have also identified a taser attached to their right hip,” FRIDAY quips. “You may want to grab that too if you wish to avoid a repeat of—”

“ _Thank you_ FRIDAY,” Peter grouses, crushing the first gun in his hands and aiming a web for the second. He’ll have to bind their hands and legs to avoid a harsh hit—Peter is souped-up, for sure, but he’d still prefer not getting beat up.

Which is a challenge, because fly-face is in the zone now, too. The next half-minute is a blur of missed blows and sharp objects, still on the vertical side of a goddamn building. There’s the distant clatter of a gun hitting concrete, decorating the sidewalk with a growing pile of debris and shattered glass. A blade cuts through the arm of his suit but fails to break skin, and Spider-man shatters one of the red lenses with a well-aimed headbutt.

If Mr. Stark isn’t going to be happy about Peter using an emergency override code, he’s not going to be overjoyed about the property damage, either.

Lungs saturated with hot air, Peter pants, putting a few yards between them, “Gotta hand it to you, you’re good. Whoever sent you must _really_ want this guy dead.”

The merc is silent, chest heaving.

“What?” Peter asks, “This wasn’t included in your quote? It’s New York, buddy. Shit’s bananas here—man, you guys never want to chat, don’t _attack_ me, I just complimented you—”

Aaaand there’s a chunky combat boot slamming into him—

Ow. Ow. That’s his _face_ and Spider-man sees stars, sees the whole entire milky way.

He even suspects that he might have lost consciousness, but before he hits the ground Peter’s body shifts to autopilot and twists to right himself.

And this time—this time, Peter catches the merc by surprise and finds purchase on a taller building. Peter swings and pivots around like an erratic pinball under the charade of trying to land another hit. It’s partly to distract his opponent and build some momentum and partly because his head is freaking screaming at him.

But soon there is a vast network of webbing stretching across from the motel to another adjacent complex and Spider-man flings himself full-force at fly-face, throwing them right at the mess of webs he’d just made.

Move left. Feint. Duck. Move right.

Bind the hands. Feint again. 

Bind the legs.

And done.

Peter crawls toward the merc, now veritably swaddled and suspended midair by his webbing. He unlatches the mask protecting their face, and…

It’s a young woman, snarling up at him with a bloody mouth, glaring through the broken polycarbonate of her lenses.

“Who are you working for?” Peter grits out. God. His head hurts, and the adrenalin is flowing out of him in droves, leaving him hollow. She only looks a few years older than him, barely an adult. What the fuck? “Who are you?”

There are black cars swarming below. FRI must have called SHIELD at some point.

“I’m nobody. I—I’m not,” she mutters, deflating. “It was a one-time thing. I don’t know who they are or what this is about, I swear. They—they just promised money.”

From below, Nick Fury’s voice booms and claws at Peter’s likely concussion-addled brain. Is the man using a megaphone?

“Spider-man,” he says, and the volume is grating, painful, “we’ll take it from here.”

__

It’s 12:11. Fury took one look at Peter stumbling around like a baby deer and ordered him to go back home.

How, though? Too dizzy. Stuck in Manhattan. He lives in Queens; Queens is very much not in Manhattan.

Transit it is.

Peter can probably scrape by enough for train fare with the money he keeps for snacks. Or he can jump the turnstiles. He’ll probably do the latter; he doesn’t have the patience.

“Karen. Karen. Kaaaren,” Peter croaks, once his back is uncomfortable against the crests and troughs of the train’s hard plastic seats.

This is what he loves about New York. Trash city. Life is just too weird—sporadic alien invasions, superpowered people left and right—no one’s going to place a second thought on some guy dressed in a Spider costume on a Thursday night. Or is it Friday now?

The three other people taking the late-night train are most definitely under the impression that he’s another drunk college student, especially with how he’s slurring and seemingly talking to himself.

“Yes, Peter?”

“Queue—queue up _Don’t Stop Believin’_ , Peter says, twirling his pointer finger like a conducting baton. “Pretty please. Cherry on top. Oh, and, uh, text May that I’m on my way home.”

“Sure thing.”

Delightfully familiar instrumentals fills Peter’s poor head.

“Just a small-town girl,” he mumbles, “living in a lonely world.”

 _She took the midnight train goin' anywhere_ , Spider-man’s headpiece croons. Peter sighs with contentment, closes his eyes, and then passes out completely on his own volition.

__

When Peter stumbles in through the window at 1:16 in the morning, May is already sitting at the dining table, flipping through a mystery novel. He kind of just… flops to the ground with an unceremonious _thump_. His hip and shoulder make impact with tile, and he groans.

Peter feels the Spider-man mask being peeled off and hears May saying, “Breaking news: area boy does not know when to stop.”

“That’s area _man_ to ya, ma’am.”

Dragging his limp jelly body to the living room couch, May asks, “Honey. Are you bleeding anywhere?”

“Don’t—don’t think so.”

“Okay. List it out.”

Peter’s mouth speaks on its own. “Suit got damaged, but—but yeah, no bleeding. Got kicked in the ribs, but nothing broken. Breathing okay. Head feels bad, though.”

“Good job,” May says. She settles him into the lumpy cushions and shuffles around the apartment for a while before returning with a first-aid kit and her phone.

Peter watches with faint intrigue as May gives her touchscreen a few taps before she says, “He’s back, Tony.”

Over the phone speaker is Mr. Stark speaking with extremely artificial chill, “How is he feeling?”

“Zoo wee mama,” Peter says.

“He’s been on the line for twenty minutes now,” May tells Peter, rifling through medical supplies for the pen light. “I’m going to check for a concussion.”

“I’m tired,” Peter says right away. “Don’t be mean to me.”

“And you’re the human manifestation of angina,” Tony grumbles, and Peter wants to tell his boss-idol-friend- _something_ to screw off because he is a jolly good delight but is interrupted with the sudden grip of a blindingly tight pressure—is someone shooting a laser beam into his eyes—?

Peter fights to regather his bearings. “You like me tons,” he says, and Tony only grunts in response.

May moves her hands away from where they were prying his eyelids wide open. “Lucky you; your pupils are fine.” She presses a kiss to his forehead, more than feather-light to keep from hurting him. 

“Yay,” Peter says.

“Do you need more painkillers?” Tony is asking. “I can send some by drone within the next twenty minutes if you’re all out.”

“We’re good, Tony. Thank you.” May is already shaking out two of the funky pill concoctions developed by SI’s R&D department. They were originally for Steve Rogers; how insane is that? Enhanced metabolisms really complicate things, sometimes—

“Oh,” Peter says, “I fought a merc, she was—”

“Enhanced, I know. I watched the footage,” Tony says. “You really chose the moment I was past the international date line to use the override codes, kid? Really?”

“The situation kind of called for it.” Peter shifts around a bit, trying and failing to get more comfortable. “Wait, where are you?”

“I’m in Seoul,” Tony explains. “It’s the middle of the day here. I was in a meeting when you logged into FRIDAY, so I didn’t get any notice until it ended,” he adds, somewhat apologetically.

Tony had given him the codes for extra protection if the situation were to ever get dire enough. “It’s okay,” Peter replies, “I managed.”

Tony sighs. “I suppose you did.”

Aw. That was almost praise. May is holding him by the back of his neck, instructing him to swallow a few gulps of water along with the pain medication. “What kinda meeting?”

“An U-GIN thing, with Helen.”

“Like _U-GIN_ U-GIN?” Peter says. “With Helen Cho? Dr. Cho was at the meeting?”

“It is her company, yes.”

Holy cow.

“Mr. Stark. Are you with Dr. Cho right now?” Peter takes a deep breath. “Please tell me you’re with her and can you tell her she’s the coolest, way cooler than that schmuck Mr. Stark—”

“She is indeed very cool but would it kill you to be more delicate about it,” Tony says, and the rumble of barely concealed laughter Peter senses must be from his aunt, “I’m sensitive and you’re hurting my feelings—”

“I will _not_ ,” Peter interjects, “and also tell her that her and Dr. Kang’s latest paper on maintaining telomere integrity in genomes undergoing regeneration Cradle therapy blew my fucking brain into a billion pieces, it’s literally revolutionary can you imagine the—”

“She’s not with me at the moment—”

“WHY—!” Peter shoots upright and _oops_ he should not have done that, or shouted. So much pain.

So much.

“Pete?” Tony says, a few more ounces of worry finally seeping into his voice. “Pete. You okay?”

“Motherf—hugger.” Nice save. “I’m, er, good. Superb.”

He puts the ‘S’ in superb. He’s Spider-man; it makes total sense.

“Great,” Tony concedes lightly, though the edge is still there. “As I was saying, she’s not with me right now because she’s getting coffee—and let me tell you, North American Starbucks is utter trash compared to this stuff. But I’ll pass the message on.”

Cringing—from belated embarrassment or pain, he can’t be sure—Peter lies back down, May guiding him gently into the couch cushions. He gives himself an extra few seconds for the worst of the aching to retreat, for the undertow to trounce the incoming pangs. “Can—can. Can you also tell her I love her. As a genetic abomination myself I want her to know that—that I love her and her work and she has my full consent for blood samples.”

“Okay, you’re making it weird, stop making it weird,” Tony says. “Tell Helen that bit on your own, excluding the last part; you’re a minor.”

“What? No,” Peter says, incredulous at the suggestion, “I’d sound like a headcase.”

“What on God’s green earth do you call this conversation, then.”

“ _Boys_ ,” May interrupts, stern but quiet to avoid jostling Peter with noise, “I think that’s enough for tonight. It’s late over here and Peter nearly got cold clocked just over an hour ago. What he needs is sleep.”

“I love you also, May. So much,” is what Peter chooses to mumble, sniffling. It makes her melt a little. “Thanks for putting up with me.”

“Any day, Pete,” she says. “But do try to keep it to a minimum.”

“Right, right,” Tony answers. “Peter, no supersoldiers talk until you’re better.”

“And no patrolling for the next three days, no ifs ands or buts.”

“And no patrolling for the next three days, no ifs ands or buts,” Tony echoes automatically. “I’ll check in with you tomorrow. Goodnight.”

“‘Night, wet blanket,” Peter slurs, growing heavier by the second.

The last thing he remembers before passing out on total purpose once more is asking May to stay close. And she does; Peter can feel the soft weight of her arms around him, the subdued purple of lavender that always ambles around in her orbit, can feel his heart come to rest. He feels real, and he sleeps.

__

Fact:

Peter is awake, but at what cost?

It is both a blessing and a curse that Peter, over the course of the semester, has managed to condition himself into waking up at unambiguously hideous hours.

“Nnng,” is the noise grovelling its way out from Peter’s throat.

There’s something stuck to his forehead; he bats at it, largely apathetic, until his body powers on enough to peel what, by touch, he recognizes as a sheet of paper taped to his face.

A lot of eye-rubbing his required before Peter can even make out the words scribbled on the note.

_I have an early shift so I had to run, but I left breakfast in the fridge! If your head is still bothering you, PLEASE just stay home. I’ll call in an excused absence._

_Love,_

_May_

Peter yawns and scratches his chin. 

“This sign can’t stop me because I can’t read,” he declares.

He should be okay; his head is rubbery scrambled eggs, but this isn’t Peter’s first rodeo and those painkillers Tony sends work well enough. He forces himself to shower, teetering under the spray of hot water, and gets dressed.

His face, though. On a whole ‘nother ride altogether.

Makeup is great for covering up bruises, but his black eye is _gnarly_. Yesterday clings to him stubbornly, like oil; patches of his skin are a mess of purples and reds. An effort is made with the yellow and green concealers stashed under the sink, but it only does as much as Peter’s talent with makeup can manage, which is, admittedly, not substantial.

He decides it’s fine. Based on previous injuries, he’s slower to heal at night because his body is generally tired from hours of activity. After a healthy amount of rest—he’s learned that beauty sleep is quite literal—and a decent breakfast, it should be gone lickity split. Hopefully the swelling will go down by the time he gets to school.

__

The first thing Ned says when Peter sets his backpack down onto the floor and takes his usual seat is, “Dude, what the actual hell?”

“Huh? Good morning to you too?”

“Your eye,” Ned whispers, and he already looks upset. Oh no.

Does Peter’s face still look as shoddy as his reflection had shown earlier this morning? Usually it’s almost gone by now as long as he gets enough calories into himself.

Oh. He forgot to eat breakfast. Way to jam up his own plans. 8 AM Peter officially despises groggy idiot 7 AM Peter. Jerk probably wouldn’t even recognize a brain cell even if one synapsed inside of him.

“I, uh,” says Peter, who has native, conversational fluency in English. He clasps his hands together behind his back, twisting his fingers. “Um. I actually have two eyes.”

Ned doesn’t laugh.

“Boxing?” Peter tries, and cringes when it’s clear that he’s just digging himself into a deeper hole, past the crust and down to the mantle. 

“Peter,” Ned says. “We video-chatted until eight last night. You hung up because said you were turning in early. Your lip is also busted.”

Oh fuck. Fuck. Did he say fuck? Because it really is an exceptional word. Such a great part of the English vernacular.

Mercifully, class starts. That’s never stopped either of them from being annoying and carrying on with soft chatter, but this time Peter looks dead ahead at the notes on the projector and tries to tune everything else out. He writes his nicest chemistry notes of the whole semester.

“Peter—”

Quietly, the stress moulding the words into a harsh hush, “Drop it, Ned.”

Then, “Later, okay? I swear.”

Neither of them speak for the rest of the period.

__

Ned is mad at him.

Later comes right after class: Ned isn’t willing to wait. He skips environmental science and makes Peter ditch his comparative government class. Ten minutes later, they’re at the Dairy Queen they’d visited back in October. It feels like so long ago.

“What’s going on with you?” Ned asks. Then he gets right into it. “I know you’re not, like, boxing or whatever now. You know how there are all these rumours of you last year, about how you would get into fights on the street? There’s a ton of theories. You’re in a gang—stuff like that. I didn’t bring any of them up because it looked like you wanted to move on. But. You’re—I don’t know what this is, but I know something is up and that you keep telling me excuses.”

Peter does not want to have this conversation.

But this is Ned, who’s just trying to look out for him, and Peter thinks bad to how badly he hurt May just last year because he’d been sneaking out and distancing himself from her for what seemed to be no good reason, and he swallows to ground himself.

“Yeah, I’m still fighting,” he says. He has to eat if he wants his healing factor to kick in, and he stares down at the sandwich and smoothie he ordered. “I never stopped.”

He takes a bite of his food.

“What?”

“I’m really good at it, Ned. I normally don’t get hurt too badly at all, with typical stuff like robbers or muggers,” he confesses, pursing his lips. His hands move up to cover his face. “But slip-ups happen, I guess. I mean, I wish they didn’t, but... it was pretty wild last night.”

“Peter, you’re not making any sense.”

He can’t say it. Not in a public space, not with the potential of other people eavesdropping. “So, uh, did you hear? About the fight involving Spider-man in lower Manhattan last night?” he asks instead, pulling out his phone and loading up the local news. When he finds an article, he slides the device over to Ned and gives him a minute to skim the paragraphs.

When Ned looks back up, confusion still written all over his face, Peter taps his wristwatch and gives it a few swipes. Watches for Ned’s reaction as the device morphs into a webshooter.

“Bystander footage caught Spider-man getting socked dead on the face. Pretty embarrassing, to be honest. It looked nasty; must have left a bruise.”

Ned is staring at the webshooter. He looks up at Peter, at all the caked makeup over his friend’s left eye. Back at the webshooter.

“Front page, right?” Peter adds, heart in his throat. “Way to go, me. I’m famous.”

An eternity passes. Peter takes a sip of strawberry-banana, a bite of grilled chicken sandwich. The meat is cooked to the point of being pasty dry and there’s not nearly enough sauce to make up for it.

Finally, Ned whispers, “Holy shit.”

“Please,” Peter says, making sure that he sounds desperate enough to convey how dire this is—which is not too difficult, given that he’s really, really verging on freaking out. “Please. You can’t tell anyone, okay? If you’re ever gonna promise me anything, it’s this. You _can’t_.”

“Are you serious?”

“As a stroke.”

“Jesus,” Ned says. “I won’t, I won’t, I promise.”

Just like that _. Just like that._ Peter sags with relief, and some of tension he’s been carrying for the past hour bursts and bleeds out at last, viscous but sure down his shoulders.

“You—you know, you’re really something, Peter.”

Peter smiles, wary but genuine. “Huh? Was that a compliment?”

“Jury’s still out on that one.”

__

After Peter had polished off his late breakfast, they’d gone back to Midtown and towards Peter’s locker. On the top shelf is a container of ointment, carrying the numbing, punchy scent of wintergreen, and a package of makeup wipes.

“Who else?”

“My aunt,” Peter offers. “And, uh. Mr. Stark?”

“For real?”

He sighs. “Yeah.”

“ _Holy shit_.”

Peter cleans the concealer off his face and checks his reflection with his phone’s front-facing camera. It’s already just a sickly yellow, healthy, beige skin taking the place of red and violet.

__

MJ knows that something is wrong.

Maybe—maybe not wrong, but different.

They’re not putting up a good act of composure, after all, with their respective fidgeting and blubbering that nothing is amiss. Ned is still reeling from the revelation, and the foot pressed down on Peter’s chest has lessened, bit by bit, but it’s still there. His thumbs and pointer finger rub at the worn hem of his shirt.

This changes everything. It has to. It recontextualizes everything. Under the shock, will Ned be angry that he lied? It’s not like anyone is entitled to anyone else’s secrets, but this was Peter hiding half his life. Is it too strange, being friends with someone who has had been bitten by a radioactive spider, who moonlights as a vigilante—

Ned taps him on the shoulder. “Hey,” he whispers.

Peter gives him a questioning look.

“Do you lay eggs?”

Some of the weight lifts from his shoulders, and Peter is taking full breaths again. How did Peter manage to befriend someone like Ned? Like MJ, who’s still discreetly watching the two of them, trying to figure them out?

“Ned,” Peter replies, borderline hysterical, “please shut _up_.”

__

He tried something new and life goes on.

May knows and she is safe. Ned knows and he is safe.

“Were you ever going to tell me?”

“No,” Peter says, because he owes it to Ned to be honest. The hurt on the other boy’s face is another hit to the chest. “But I’m glad I did.”

“And how about now? With MJ?”

He hasn’t thought about that yet.

__

Not to, like, toot his own horn or anything, but Peter has his outpourings of brilliance every now and again, and he can be oh so very clever.

For instance:

Ned is finishing up the Buzzfeed quiz Peter had loaded onto his laptop, clicking his favourite potato dish—fries, obviously. _How would you spend your ideal day off?_ Video games at home. _What’s your favourite pizza topping?_ Ham and pineapple—okay, Ned’s on thin fucking ice. Target over Walmart, okay, he’s almost there…

 _Pick a cookie!_ writes Buzzfeed. Ned hums, chewing idly on the carrot stick dangling halfway out of his mouth. Peter stares intently at his friend, back at the screen, and at Ned’s furrowed brows. The carrot crunches loudly when Ned bites down.

After a long period of deliberation, Ned clicks on the stock image of snickerdoodles, nodding to himself.

Hm. Peter hastily catalogues the information, shoving them into a secure file cabinet in his head. There’s some real avant-garde espionage happening here; it’s only late November; neither he nor MJ are gonna suspect damn a thing.

“Man, that was a tough one,” Ned mutters to himself. He’s taking the quiz very seriously. “I do love oatmeal raisin. It doesn’t deserve the hate it gets.”

There’s only one question left and then Ned will find out what obscure fruit he is. Peter had gotten a rambutan, this crimson-haired fruit that tastes like lychees. Ned selects _action/adventure_ as his preferred movie genre before sitting back, waiting for the results to load.

“I’m a mangosteen!” he exclaims. “Oh, man, they’re delicious—agh, so many childhood memories. My dad used to buy them from the Asian market whenever I got a good grade back in elementary school. Super great incentive. Western fruits do not hit the same; Peter, you’ve got to try one.”

“You know, Buzzfeed quizzes collect data on your activity and then siphon it off to marketers for extra money,” MJ says. It’s a Tuesday, so she’s eating one of those gross tuna melts she never finishes again. The cheese mix broiled over the top is already solidifying into a nasty mass of fat. “They say any response data is anonymized, but aren’t you left wondering at just how much corporations know about you? About everyone? It’s dystopic.”

The hyper-specific ads Peter had gotten for pastel slinkies within an hour of zoning out in AcaDec while a few other members had been discussing what they had planned for their physics projects—a Rube-Goldberg machine of their own design—come to mind.

But never mind that. MJ needs to give into peer pressures and take this one itty bitty quiz. Just the one so he can know her favourite cookie, ideally right now _immediately_.

“Okay,” Ned agrees, smooth and nonplussed as water down a stream. Then, because he’s the best, he adds, “but are you really prepared to spend the rest of your life wondering? Don’t you wanna know which exotic fruit you are?”

MJ lapses into a fleeting but entertaining face journey that makes Peter cough back a laugh. She shifts her glare at him, but Peter can only smile.

“Yeah,” she finally says, as if the very admission is taking out her lifeforce, as if curiosity is eating at her, “I really do.” 

“Ha-hah,” Ned teases, “submitting to societal norms like the rest of us. Who’s the loser now?”

MJ’s nose scrunches up. It’s kind of cute, she’s really—okay, _focus_. There’s a job to do. 

Ned grins and slides Peter’s laptop across the table, and Peter’s strategic maneuver continues to work in spite of the minor speed bump. They’re being finessed and they don’t even know it.

Peter lives second by excruciating second in the short time interval it takes for MJ to complete the survey, following the shift and press of her fingers as they move across the trackpad.

MJ is a starfruit, acidic before it yellows and ripens into something still tart but enjoyably sweet. Since Peter couldn’t see what MJ had selected while she taking the quiz, he scrolls back up once his laptop gets handed back to see her answers—fries, sleeping the day away, just extra cheese, Costco—

There. _Pick a cookie!_

Chocolate chip. Awesome. Chocolate chip cookies for MJ, snickerdoodles for Ned. Peter loves his genius brain and he loves Buzzfeed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WILD 
> 
> i would have posted this earlier but... animal crossing :( i'm very late to the party (ie. i started like last week) and the turnip market is already hurting me
> 
> also what is pacing?? i planned to have the grocery store Incident in this chapter, but the word doc just. kept getting longer and longer and then i had to shift my whole outline. it be like that i guess 
> 
> i hope everyone is having an ok week so far, and i hope this brightened it a bit!


	4. breakthrough

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> we're getting somewhere finally

Peter has this habit that manifests almost exclusively when he is in costume. Usually for the sake of being cheeky, he leaves handwritten notes with tape adhered to indignant foreheads, backs and chests with exclamations of _You forgot this_ or _Beat ya to it!_

When he has the energy, he doodles in something sloppy and thematically appropriate, like a pudgy oval with eight legs or a simple smiley face. Signs it off with a flourish of _Yours, Spidey_.

It’s hardly necessary; Spider-man’s routes, his starts and stops and fights can often be traced along the staccato of webbing drawn along the cityscape, like a toddler’s messy etch-a-sketch project. The tune plays differently with each circuit, both a variant and an amalgamation of the nights before. There is no need to announce his presence any further, but he does anyway, to say _I was here, I am picking up your slack_ and _I will leave parts of myself on the streets that will not dissolve by morning._

At home Peter’s presence is more involuntary: it’s in the discarded clothes on his bedroom floor and other classic staples of teenage chaos. There’s a tiny bit of him, even, in the pencil he dropped on the floor over a week ago and still hasn’t picked up.

The theory is that he picked it up from May, who keeps pads of yellow post-its in the kitchen drawer and presses them on the sides of the fridge and to the curve of earthenware pots. There is a slip of paper that reads _Jean-Luc_ in May’s curvy lettering with a messier _(Picard!)_ from Ned right below stuck to her new golden barrel cactus. It’s placed right by the window under the full sun.

Ben never wrote _anything_ down. Couldn’t be bothered.

He was a bold man with a sharp memory, who waited for things to return to him and click back in place instead of reeling them in. For Ben, such a strategy worked well enough; if something didn’t require precision, then eyeballing was the way—a younger Peter, seated at the kitchen island of a home now long gone, noted that his uncle never followed instructions if he could help it.

 _Too much work_ , Ben would say. _Ratios are an_ emotion _, Pete. The stars have final say and they’re telling me to add exactly this much water._

 _It’s the middle of the day_ , Peter would say.

_The stars!_

Sure, every now and then Ben would forget to buy enough eggs or milk to get through the week, but when he had time to cook, his dinners were always delicious. Ben made the best challah _ever_ and he could do it from pure muscle memory. Peter has fond memories of Ben teaching him how to knead. Teaching him, with dextrous fingers, increasingly elaborate braiding patterns. His raspy laugh and a flour-caked hand in Peter’s hair when he inevitably messed up.

Where bits and pieces of May and Peter are scattered around their home, there is little trace of Ben left—there is nothing small to hoard like post-it notes or handwritten recipes, to hold and read.

Peter would really appreciate a Ben Parker cookie recipe right now; December is here, winter break is approaching, and he still needs to get those baked goods whipped up for Ned and MJ.

He wants to do something special for them, like a token of his appreciation for… being around, to put it aptly.

Plus, it’s almost like taking a part of Ben and gouging him out to be part of today. Double whammy. Ben may not have been one for minor trinkets, but there are big, big parts of him that live on in home videos. That live on in his grandmother’s menorah, stored somewhere in the apartment. Safely like a treasure, but away, without the expectation of being found.

But those things are big, so very direct.

They scare him; Peter is worried that it’s still too soon for him to stomach. That he will play a recording from when he was in first grade and immediately think of Ben’s excited voice, encouraging six-year-old Peter Parker as he learned how to bike and do something mortifying like cry. Or that May will notice that Peter had dug out the old DVDs, point it out, and he’d do something mortifying like cry.

There’s a remark about unnecessary machismo hovering about, not so much a reprimand; rather, a stilted attempt to lighten the mood, like a hovering hand over the ball of Peter’s shoulder. Wanting to comfort, unsure of how. 

Or if he feels the weight of the menorah in his hands, heavy as a warehouse building, everything will flood, and he will relive Ben gently nudging Peter forward to slot the first candle in. He’ll replay the calmer intonations of Ben singing _Ma'oz Tzur_ and his mind will be a torrent, a storm—and Peter is smart enough to know that he just can’t do it. Not yet. It’s too big.

Baking.

That’s a Ben Thing; he and May aren’t exactly kitchen connoisseurs. And while it’s… not small, cookies are not big. Medium-ish, at worst, so it’ll have to do.

__

Peter taps the butt of his pen against his lower lip. The weather is getting drier by the day and they’re getting dangerously close to cracking.

There’s a minor hitch in his plans: he and May don’t bake much. Or at all, really. They can both do basic stir fries and pastas—and easiest of all, takeout. They have a whole drawer of menus from restaurants from all over the neighborhood to prove it. 

Thus the necessity for a new bag of flour, a lot of butter, brown sugar, cream of tartar, semi-sweet chocolate chips… the list goes on.

Peter has a debit card that May lets him use; she deposits his allowance to said account every two weeks or so. The bulk of it is spent on extra food to meet his metabolic demands, blowing through every cent so thoroughly that he barely has any savings—and what he does have needs to be stashed away so he can buy May something nice for the end of the year. Peter’s not about to ask May to give him more money—it’s not like she’s made of the stuff.

But he knows someone who is.

**Peter >> Mr. Stark **

[16:56] hi

[16:57] hi mr stark do you happen to be free dec 11 after your board meeting

[16:57] :) :) :)

**Mr. Stark**

[18:41] How did you know I have a board meeting

**Peter**

[18:47] i asked friday and she told me because i’m very polite

**Mr. Stark**

[18:49] First DUM-E now this

**Peter**

[18:50] lol

[18:51] so are u free

**Mr. Stark**

[18:55] Depends. Is it important?

**Peter**

[19:00] oh yeah BIG sos

[19:00] can you meet me here, like around 5

[19:01] [link]

**Mr. Stark**

[19:03] …Foodtown?

**Peter**

[19:04] 5 pm :)

__

New York is a raucous jumble even on its more peaceful days. To an outsider, it can look like mayhem—but there’s a system of unexpressed cooperation; every knows to waste no time, take big strides, and be an eensy bit apeshit. The level of frenzy makes an annual uptick near the holidays, too; retail workers are suffering because they’re still recovering from the pandemonium of black Friday while dealing with end-year sales. Office workers a suffering from deadlines. Students are suffering from general burnout.

Like most things in big cities are, the grocery store Peter picked is cramped but navigable, using every inch available to stack their products high enough to loom over its shoppers. There are crunchy apples, sour apples and nasty mealy ones. Peter is going on about the intimidating number peanut butter choices to Tony—who, through Peter’s gamble, did actually show up, suit and all.

Peter had neglected to tell Tony what the trip to Foodtown was for, and SI meetings still need to be held into New York proper. Luring him into a grocery took a mix of correct timing and curiosity, on Tony’s part.

“Hey, look,” Peter says, tapping one of the price tags with his fingers. They’d already picked up eggs and butter from the dairy section, and now weaving through aisles to find baking supplies. “Vegan peanut butter. But just this one, and not the other… twenty brands. Isn’t all peanut butter vegan?”

“Enlighten me,” Tony says, lingering behind the younger boy, glaring at the crinkled-up shopping list that Peter had shoved into his hands a few minutes earlier. “What are you doing here?”

It’s already dark outside; the sky is a deep, solid gray. Winter tires the sun out by mid-afternoon, gradually replaced by low-beams and neon signage.

“We,” Peter amends, moving on past the jam, past the boxes of tea and a rainbow of Powerade, “are getting baking supplies.”

In no time at all, Peter is also presented with a staggering amount of flour options. There are a few factors to keep in mind: he only needs all-purpose, so that rules out the whole wheat and cake flour.

Understanding dawns on Peter’s shopping companion. Peter’s surprised it took this long, but Tony does look more rumpled than usual. Then again, the older man’s baseline is ‘worn out but functional.’

“Oh goodness,” he says, “you want my credit card.”

Peter resists the urge to snort, shooting Tony a quick grin. “Promise I won’t bankrupt you, boss.”

“There you go with the ‘boss’ thing again. Did you pick that up from Happy?” Tony asks, to which Peter mutters a yes. Then he adds, “I’m still in awe that you managed to rope me into this. You only dragged me here so you wouldn’t have to pay for anything, didn’t you?”

Peter rolls his eyes, encouraged by Tony’s tone. It’s too many shades scandalized-Elizabethan-madame to be anything but amusement.

“I’m sure you can handle it, moneybags.”

“Wow, no denial at all—that stings.”

“I’ll make you some cookies in exchange for hurting your ego,” Peter says, still staring ahead at the bags. The remaining issue is how much flour Peter needs—that would depend on how many times he botches his yield, or if he wants to keep enough leftover flour to make stuff to eat at home. Room for error is always good.

Tony goes on to imply less than stellar things about his kitchen skills.

Peter, having knelt down to pick up a ten-pound sack of flour, has another retort to carry on their verbal catfight teetering out of his mouth. He’s about to set his cargo into the metal cart they’d been pushing around, turning around.

And in that moment he swears he could puke his guts up.

Tony must sense Peter blue-screening because he stills too—and no words are spoken as Peter stares ahead at MJ, scrambling to reconcile the fact that she exists outside of Midtown and AcaDec. It’s—it’s like different parts of his life are segmented, right? For the sake of organization, you only anticipate certain people in a particular setting, so seeing them exit those imaginary bounds feels like being thrown for a loop.

Ten pounds of flour slip out of his grip and into the cart with a clang, off beat with the bubble-gum pop track booming through the building, and Peter should really say something before this gets more awkward than it already is.

His loud “UH,” is punctuated by Mr. Stark being terrible and chortling at his expense.

As always: nice one, Peter.

“Hi Michelle—uh, MJ.”

“Hi,” MJ says. She’s bundled up in a winter jacket on the thinner side, scarf unfurled and hanging by the back of her neck.

“ _Whatareyoudoinghere_.”

MJ does the face Peter used to interpret as ‘are you dumb,’ but now understands that she’s taking a few moments to make sense of things. She gestures at her pile of produce. Yes. They’re in a grocery store, a public space where people can go inside and use money in exchange for goods and services.

“Right. Right. I’m also doing that.”

“He is,” Tony says.

Peter hates his boss-man. How do you explain Iron Man being at a Queens market? “Internship stuff. Very important.”

Succinct.

“Yuh-huh,” Tony says, and dread pools into Peter’s intestines, weighing them back down and away from his throat. Mr. Stark is behind him, but Peter knows that the man constantly moves from one fact to another, coming to the _correct_ conclusions faster and moving onto the next thing before other people even realize anything is happening; Tony is _never_ going to let this go.

“Sure looks like it,” she replies.

Peter backs up and starts tugging at Mr. Stark’s sleeve. They have to leave pronto. “We’re going now,” he says, too quickly, and closes the curtains on the potential rudeness with, “nice seeing you.”

MJ nods, puzzled. She offers a hesitant wave goodbye.

Peter pulls, lightly at first, but Tony is planted where he stands. “Mush,” Peter says.

Mr. Stark, that sick bastard, does not move.

Dialing down the compulsive hypervigilance has been a challenging learning curve—an exercise in modifying his thought processes and nonsense calming techniques, like meditation. It’s hard even as a civilian going about normal civilian errands. But Peter is chapped that he hadn’t noticed MJ standing _right there_ when he is, at the moment, overwhelmingly aware of her watching the scene play out in front of her.

When Peter finally wrangles his stubborn mule of a mentor to the safe refuge of the crackers/condiments section, Tony steps away the second Peter lets go. Then he is forced to witness, in abject horror, as Tony tilts his body back into MJ’s field of view to dole out, of all things, a peace sign.

Upon his triumphant return, Peter asks, “Are you six.”

“ _You’re_ six,” Tony challenges. “Good God you are red all over.”

Eugh. He is notably warmer than before, on the verge of breaking into a sweat. “No, _you_ ,” Peter says.

Tony blows out a breath. “So,” he diverts, peering at the grocery list, “you’re aware that we still need to get the… let’s see: two types of sugar, cream of tartar, and vanilla extract, aren’t you? From the aisle we just walked away from?”

“It looked like she was headed to checkout,” Peter says. “We can wait. Over here, for like five minutes.”

“You want us to keep standing here until she leaves?”

Well shucks, when you put it like that…

“Yeah?” He puts his hands on his hips.

Tony’s eyes narrow.

“Yeah,” Peter says, more adamantly this time. He grimaces, refusing to make eye contact. “Why not, right? We can, uh, look at the crackers—don’t laugh at me.” He turns to the rows and rows of foodstuffs. “See, these ones are weight watchers approved. Stop laughing!”

Peter holds out a box of sea salt thins up high to hide his face.

“This is _ridiculous_ ,” Tony says, and his mouth is a poor attempt at a straight line. “Hauling me here was a _great_ idea.”

__

Peter has two reusable bags hanging from each arm while Tony is carrying a smaller bag—an assortment of overpriced protein bars he’s probably going to make Peter take home. Peter had let it slip a few weeks ago that Ned now knows his identity as Spider-man. And, with prodding, also disclosed that it was less of a deliberate choice and more because Peter’s healing factor had gone on power-saving mode that morning on account of not eating. 

Tony had huffed. “Only you,” he’d said. “Do we trust him?”

“Yeah,” Peter had said easily.

Conspicuously, Tony doesn’t raise the topic again while they were inside. They waited out the five minutes by the low-fat crackers with an uneasy peace. Tony even timed it on his watch.

That, Peter deduces, could mean two things:

Case one: Tony has decided to be nice. 

Case two: Tony is keeping quiet so that Peter is tricked into a sense of false insecurity.

“Classmate of yours?” Tony asks, and that’s case two. There’s a slight windchill that’s dropped the temperature by several degrees since they’ve first arrived, and Peter suppresses a shiver.

Peter hums an affirmative but otherwise clamps his mouth shut, waiting on the trunk lock of Tony’s car to click open. 

No amount of mental preparation, however, makes hearing _the_ scientific goliath you’ve idolized since childhood say, to your face, “The birds and the bees, huh?” bearable. 

Do not respond. Do not engage; it will only encourage him.

At Peter’s silence, he adds, “You know I don’t mean the ones that are disappearing at an alarming rate, right, kid?”

Okay, that was kind of funny, but it’s too batty to comprehend—just because Peter talks to Iron Man every so often, you know, no biggie, does not mean there isn’t some residual novelty to it, stubbornly latching on. 

“Oddly quiet in your direction,” he says, sighing. “Well, that’s fine. It’s not as if you need anyone explaining the, er, finer points to you, given the numbers on your hotel room bill, that one time.”

That one time? Hotel? What does anything have to do with a hotel? He hasn’t ever stayed in a hotel unless he counted Germa— _Wait_.

Peter _whirls_.

The last bag, still not loaded into the trunk, falls to the ground unnoticed.

“What!”

“What?”

“Excuse you!” Peter sputters, short-circuiting. Sparks are flying everywhere. “You—how do you know, _how_ do you know that that was two entire years ago, what the _fuck_ —”

“Woah.” Tony holds both his hands up in surrender, like a stunned red panda. The plastic bag of protein bars dangles from his left thumb. “At least the receipt didn’t actually indicate _what_ you were watching, only the category it belonged to—”

“But how do you even know—” There’s no way that Tony McMoney Stark would need to check his balance.

Holy shit, Peter used Iron Man’s credit card for—agh.

His fourteen-year-old self hadn’t even made the connection, so wrapped up in the sheer excitement of overseas travel and being asked to nab Captain America’s shield. Of course hotels would charge for every dinky thing. Hotels don’t let you sleep in them for free. Someone pays money.

“Happy was in charge of room expenses, even though it was on my card.”

“And he told you,” Peter concludes, flatly. At least the winter chill makes it difficult to differentiate his cheeks being flushed from the cold and. Agh.

A shrug. “Hap is… good at noticing minor details. I did hire him as a bodyguard, at first.”

Holy shit. Peter is going to die. Peter is going to die in this grocery store parking lot. What a way to go. “Happy is dead to me,” he proclaims. “Agh.”

“Uh-huh,” Tony says. “If it makes you feel better, I really wish I didn’t know.”

“And yet,” Peter grumbles, burying his face into his hands, “here you are, bringing it up.”

“I said I wish I didn’t know, not that my memory isn’t eidetic, kiddo.”

“Oh my God. Please at least try to scrub it away. I won’t ever do it again, I swear.”

“I mean—I hope not?”

“Oh my God. I’m so sorry. Mr. Stark. Don’t look at me.”

Through the gaps of his gloved fingers, Peter sees Tony roll his eyes and put his sunglasses on.

__

“Methinks,” Tony says cheerfully, ruined carton soaked in slimy egg guts in hand, “that we need to pick up more eggs before we go.”

Certain contents of the bag Peter had dropped are not faring well. Tony had shuffled over to pick them up, ignoring Peter’s requests to be poleaxed.

Said requests screeched to a halt, suddenly forgotten, when Tony had knelt down to grab the handles and his hip popped audibly.

They’ve both embarrassed themselves today, though Peter is winning by a wide berth. 

He sighs. Okay. Back to Foodtown.

__

Physically fit individuals discipline their bodies down to the cell—the lungs learn to accommodate more and more oxygen, learn not to stagger while being pricked with pins and needles from the strain of exercise. The skeletal muscle the wraps around his arms and legs has a limited mind of its own, too. Reflexes can command the joints without any conscious thought. They even say that once you’ve built muscle once and lose it, under whatever circumstances—fasting, starvation—the body remembers it once took up more space, existed more loudly, and will bounce back alarmingly fast.

The heart, too. It will learn to pump blood with greater efficiency; the resting heart rates of athletes are remarkably low, some hearts so well-trained that they let out a little _swoosh_ noise between each beat from how hard it contracts.

Swoosh sounds, however, are also almost synonymous with _something is wrong with your heart_ , which is pretty neat. It either means you’re, like, really, really fit or have some sort of problem.

Peter’s heart rate is abnormally low, even by that modified metric. Awake, biometric scans only register thirty swooshes per minute, slow and steady despite the jittering thing it’s attached to.

It speeds up when he’s swinging around as Spider-man, obviously, and in situations like right now. Back flat against the brown, worn bench-seat of a school bus and easing himself out of a dreamless sleep like he’s rousing from a coma, boy-in-the-iceberg style.

Though the comparison falls flat, given that MJ’s not cradling him in her arms or anything. Her face is hovering a good foot over his own, ringlets of hair slipping out from where it had been tucked behind her ears. She’s using the bend of her knee to nudge at his head, repeatedly, in an effort to wake him up.

“Get up.”

The experience is definitely up there, though, because Peter gets to stare at her unabashedly while she stares back with the excuse of being out of it. If he actually were that groggy Peter is sure he’d do something idiotic, like risk his hand by bringing it to her cheek—

His hand is moving on its own. Silly.

Peter diverts his knuckles to rub at his sore eyes instead, just in time. The day is saved.

“Oh, hello.”

“Get up,” MJ repeats. They’re at ESU’s Manhattan campus again. She hasn’t put on the yellow club blazer on yet—captain or not, she will not wear the damn thing unless completely necessary. “We’re here, dude. I need you alert if we want to beat this literal engineering school.”

“Help me, Peter Parker,” he says, stifling a yawn, “you’re my only hope.”

He’s always bolder when his brain is moderately sedated. It’s great. Some people are grouchy, others are non-verbal, while Peter simply loses his anxiety filter.

And, bless her—she never brought up the cursed grocery store run-in. They’re both acting like it didn’t happen, which means Peter doesn’t have to recoil from embarrassment every time he sees her.

“I’m going to pour water on you.” MJ straightens and pulls her thermos from out her backpack, giving it a shake. “It’s cold; it’ll wake you up.”

“Now that’s a waste of water,” Peter says.

“Huh,” MJ says, “you’ve got a point there.”

“I have so many points.”

Peter pushes himself up. There’s no one left on the bus; Ned is gone, and he even spots the driver through murky, bird poop-stained windows, taking a vape break. The two of them quickly put on their coats before racing out to the building together.

__

**Peter >> Ned **

[22:01] you know how u said that mj liked liz

**Ned**

[22:11] i recall

**Peter**

[22:13] like i’m just wondering

[22:14] not that i have any issue with it or anything

[22:14] that’d be kind of ironic so 

**Ned**

[22:15] w

[22:16] oh

[22:16] OOOOH ok

[22:17] thanks for trusting me with this :)

**Peter**

[22:18] jlnvfjkndSDV yeah ANYWAY 

[22:18] i’m curious if

[22:20] does she also like guys

**Ned**

[22:21] .

**Peter**

[22:22] ned

**Ned**

[22:23] lmao why do you ask

**Peter**

[22:24] you’re trying to make me say it

[22:25] well i won’t!

**Ned**

[22:25] no say it

[22:26] i’ll give you her goodreads username

**Peter**

[22:28] KHFDBDHJLV

[22:28] don’t i respect her privacy

**Ned**

[22:28] bro she posts her reading list on a /public website not her deepest darkest thoughts

[22:29] she’s reading some novel translated from japanese rn

**Peter**

[22:30] is it about a murder

**Ned**

[22:31] well you’d know that if you had her goodreads wouldn’t you

**Peter**

[22:31] i’ll ask her myself

**Ned**

[22:32] will you?

**Peter**

[22:33] no

**Ned**

[22:33] do you… have a thing for acadec captains

[22:35] i can see your chat bubble go up and down

[22:36] i know you saw this you /literally/ have read receipts on

**Ned >> Peter**

[22:40] peder

**Peter**

[22:41] nedward

**Ned**

[22:42] lol

[22:42] yeah she likes guys too

[22:43] i wouldn’t mess with you just to tell you she doesn’t

[22:44] so are you gonna shoot your shot or

**Peter**

[22:46] ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

**Ned >> Peter**

[22:52] um off topic but what did you get for q 14

[22:53] on the chem problem set

**Peter**

[22:54] wait we had homework?

**Ned**

[22:55] oh my god

__

After the scrimmages in Manhattan—Midtown is basically guaranteed to carry on into the spring term and the remaining competitions before winter break are basically a formality at this point—remains just another week and a half left of school. Peter is raring to go; he and Ned are planning to catch a movie, there’s more time to make rounds across the city. Everyone deserves to go home to their loved ones for the end of the year.

But first he has his Spanish oral presentation left to suffer through, and he volunteered for tech booth duty for two out of five days of _The Nutcracker and the Mouse King_ to support the theatre kids. And the cookies.

The week leading up to the last day of school, Peter alternates between churning out incoherent bullshit for Spanish, churning out incoherent bullshit for comparative government, microsleeping upright, forehead pressed against his kitchen counter, and mixing dough. Lots of dough.

Cookie baking is supposed to be one of the more basic tasks one can accomplish with an oven, but Peter forgets the cream of tartar in his first attempt at snickerdoodles, and only realizes when he taste-tests one and the characteristic acidic tang is missing. The chocolate chip cookies are more forgiving and turn out okay on the first try, but he splits them with May and alters the recipe to have less flour. He also finds a container of leftover raisins, forgotten in the pantry, so he makes cookies out of that, too.

The final Friday arrives like the deadline of a self-imposed group presentation.

Peter will freely admit to being self-serving, at least partly. Most people enjoy believing they are good. It makes them feel good about themselves, like a vicious cycle.

There’s hope in him that this will prompt MJ to think, ‘Wow, Peter can be a pretty decent guy. I am confident that I can take this gift at face-value: a gesture of friendship and that alone, without being concerned that he expects me to date him in exchange. He is not a misogynistic douchebag, after all. Look at him go, accomplishing the bare minimum. However, I can say the thought of a romantic relationship with him does not repulse me. Much.’

Hell yeah. It doesn’t need to be that word-for-word, obviously.

But it’s not the _primary_ motivator. He does genuinely want to show his friends how much he likes them without the trouble of saying it outright. They deserve it.

Peter imagines what he might tell them: Hey, guys. Did I ever tell you that Midtown kind of made me miserable up until I met you guys because I didn’t make the effort to get to know other people and it never felt like I belonged here? You’ve both been great, though, and you give me something to look forward to on school days. Wow, that was insanely personal. I am not trying to turn this into a poor-Peter Parker pity party. My bad. I’m going to combust in a few seconds, now—please stand back.

There is no time left to keep workshopping _that_ , so what he actually does is drop the cookies onto the cafeteria table like a construction crane.

MJ’s typing pauses—she’s in another comparative government class than his, but she’s also apparently putting off her essays—and she looks up. Peter leans over and pats the cookies.

“These—you,” he says, and doesn’t sigh. Why waste time say lot word when few do trick?

“Me,” MJ intones. Her brows furrow as she picks up the package.

“Happy early holidays, MJ.”

Her expression holds, MJ’s thumb tapping at the cookies through thin plastic wrap. Peter’s attention flickers to Ned for a moment, who is already happily occupied after saying a quick, “Dude! Thank you!”

MJ offers her thanks as well, even as she wears her squinty ‘what’s going on’ face again. “Why—why do you look mad,” he says, almost pouting. “Please, MJ; I’ve been baking for days. Ages. I think and dream in butter and sugar.”

It’s true. This is merely the tip of the iceberg of how many cookies he’s made. Baking is both more soothing and stressful than Peter had expected.

“I didn’t get you anything,” MJ says.

And if that isn’t the most endearing response he could have gotten, jeez.

Peter brushes her off, delivering a watered-down version of his Appreciation Speech. MJ’s own awkward floundering gives him a little confidence boost and he leans on it when he says, “I’m really happy I met you guys,” and Ned pats him on the back with the hand that isn’t holding a snickerdoodle.

Red ears are a frequent plight on his life now. This is especially true as Ned doles out a “I wish I’d met you sooner.” And doubly so as MJ, who habitually pecks at her food and forgets it halfway through the lunch period in favour of her sketchbook or laptop or homework, polishes off two cookies. Then she reaches for a third.

__

Winter recess means Peter barricades himself in his bedroom and sleeps until he feels like an actual person again. Within those two days of limited consciousness—his favorite—the city honestly goes batshit, with millions of people—tourists from the North, adults returning for family visits, kids mad with power and sudden free time—pouring out into the streets regardless of the overcast skies.

Peter gets chills down his spine imagining the crowd size by New Year’s Eve. Don’t get him wrong; he wouldn’t trade it for anything, but. Ack.

If it isn’t for work, May forgoes driving because the combination of traffic, slushy roads and parking fees compound into the stuff of nightmares.

This finds May and Peter anchovy-ing themselves into subway cars to steal a peek at the festivities. Because their eventual destination is to Rockefeller Centre for some skating, they get to take the E line. This is worth noting for only one reason: Manhattan is the MTA and city council’s spoiled child and was given first priority for train car upgrades while other boroughs are still puttering along with tech from the disco age. Peter isn’t bitter or anything.

Skating is fun. Peter even shows off a little to May with some twirls and hockey stops. He spots Betty and waves hello, only to see _Flash_ five minutes later and sprint to the other side of the rink.

He wouldn’t mind spotting MJ again if she were here. Peter thinks he’s mentally fortified from his last encounter, and it would be his chance to greet her like a normal person. Redemption. 

When that’s done, both of them gradually make their way south and pass all the bright Koreatown signage, the Flatiron, and as soon as NoHo is also behind them, Peter juts his finger in the general direction of the Holland Tunnel and says, “That’s where I got my shit rocked a while back, like eight blocks down.”

May pats his arm. “I know, hon.”

Peter had gone by the area a few days ago to check up on it. The side of the building where he and that enhanced woman had fought was garbed in construction netting.

He’s grateful Mr. Stark is paying for that, because he does feel guilty—though not a lot, because the other person was trying to _kill a man_ —but also because Tony Stark's “generous donation” means that the Daily Bugle isn’t demanding the menacing Spider-man be sent to the gallows.

… more than twice a week, but that’s a problem for later.

He hopes the merc he helped arrest is relatively okay, too. She’s still in SHIELD custody and Peter’s been told that they don’t really know what to do with her; apparently Peter’s inability to run facial ID on her that night wouldn’t have mattered anyway because no one could find legal records of her, like, anywhere, until they decrypted data from some confiscated HYDRA hardware. If the woman’s word is to be trusted, she’d fled—from captivity, not as a willing operative—after HYDRA’s activities in the States had been exposed back in 2014 and had been pursuing a life in obscurity ever since. (Rent doesn’t pay itself, though.)

So Peter had inadvertently opened a rather fat can of worms.

Between Tony continually shooing Ross away with the irritation of waving around a fly swatter that never quite hits its target and continued investigations, SHIELD has its hands pretty full. 

He and May, after about an hour total of waking, discounting their window-shopping and a break in a Macy’s to unthaw, finally make it to the lower East side.

The synagogue is large and imposing from the outside, embellished with Moorish architecture to commemorate the golden age of Spain—in memory of a period of peace and freedom of faith. This place had been used to welcome immigrants and familiarize them with local job opportunities, had assisted them in their searches for housing. It helped build New York, and New York rescued it from complete decay in return, close to a century later.

There are the vibrations of music as they enter. It’s a mini concert nearing its tail end, so he and May linger at the back to listen to the thrums of the string bass and cymbals. The high ceilings let the sounds carry far, eddying around the arches and curves of the museum interior.

Soon, people are clapping, the performers give their thanks and the crowd gradually disperses. The space fills instead with an echoing quiet, the occasional chatter of conversation, and the tandem footsteps of visitor groups being led along by tour guides.

May squeezes his shoulder. “You okay?” she asks.

Peter feels… ruffled, but he is. He’s been here a handful of times when he was younger, oohing and aahing at how open and big the place was. Everything seems smaller now.

“Yee- _yup_ ,” he says.

This place is like a pocket dimension, Peter thinks. Everything reminds him of the stars and the sky—not just the rose window, which is a sea of ultramarine and cyan encircling a more timid ring of yellow, but also the stenciling, the ceiling dome and the hundreds of light fixtures, fashioned from glass.

They sit down at the pews to admire the artwork, breathe in the smell of wood, and take some time to exist. The warmth of the building makes him drowsy.

__

For the length of his tragically short, two week break, whenever Peter isn’t patrolling (read: dissolving fist fights between Miscellaneous Drunk New Yorker one and Miscellaneous Drunk New Yorker two) or tucked into the couch with his aunt, he retires to the beach house in his mind. It’s only a matter of time before Peter is expected to use his brain again and he can’t bring himself to lie about looking forward to it.

And speaking of using brains: Midtown delegates the month of January to hold review sessions for term one classes and host exams. The only advantage there is that actual classes are sparse. A good portion of school staff and students are clearly still on vacation mode, so the lack of mental presence leading up to the exam period means that attendance is almost a non-issue until spring term begins.

So, along with Ned and MJ, he spends a lot of school hours away from Midtown, cramming and procrastinating.

Approaching the end of the exam period, the three of them are seated at a round softwood table, the café speakers blasting some lo-fi playlist chosen by the current barista on shift. MJ has a cappuccino, Ned got the same drink as her but with an extra serving of espresso, and Peter had ordered a hot chocolate. He can’t handle caffeine. It drives his body bonkers.

They’re exchanging spring term schedules. He and Ned fistbump; they have calc with a teacher that couldn’t care less about who sits where, as long as they shout “here” during attendance and keep quiet.

“Hey, look at that,” MJ says. “You have morning English with me.”

Peter does a double take, looking at her screen and his. She’s right. 

Oh _hell_ yeah.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i'm not jewish nor have i ever been to new york, so if you are and there's some inaccuracies here, feel free to point it out. what i've written is largely based on my own research. 
> 
> some notes:  
> \- peter: haha i LURED tony to come spend time with me / tony: wanted to anyway but won't say it  
> \- my non-american ass: has to google if the US sells bags of flour with the weight in pounds  
> \- funnier variety of culture shock: you guys also sell gas by the gallon and the first time i passed a gas station visiting the states i needed a second to reboot  
> \- respect the kilogram  
> \- to whoever posted the shelves brimming with peanut butter jars to foodtown's image gallery on google maps: thanks for the inspo. luv u  
> \- peter is 16 in this fic, and his mcu birthyear is set as 2001. which means this story is set in 2017, the year the last jedi came out. i didn't specify what movie ned and peter were planning to watch......................... so that's up to you to imagine  
> \- may and peter were visiting the jewish museum at eldridge street, which was restored from one of new york's (and america's) first synagogues. the rose window mentioned is a gorgeous piece of art fkjvndjkn  
> \- the golden age of spain was marked by minimal religious tension, and the eldridge synagogue drew inspiration from architectural styles common to that era during its construction!
> 
> wow i am chatty today 
> 
> ok see you

**Author's Note:**

> i'm also @mindshelter on tumblr, so you're welcome to talk to me over there!
> 
> i hope to update quicker than i historically have since i've finally finished my second year of uni and am trying to get ahold of myself (lol) amongst all the quarantine chaos. i hope everyone is safe and doing alright!
> 
> as always, thank you for reading :) comments are appreciated and also make my day.


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